


A Chasm in Two Jumps

by Deannie



Series: Chasm-verse [2]
Category: Quantum Leap, The Losers (2010), The Losers (Comic), The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Reality, Community: hc_bingo, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Instability, Not A Fix-It, Past Child Abuse, Whump, it's complicated - Freeform, whacked crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-04
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-04-19 00:34:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 91,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4726121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This guy… this guy and his project had changed history. They’d changed history and they hadn’t even had the decency to make sure Jake changed with it. He had two different sets of dead kids in his head and this <i>Admiral</i> and his people didn’t even think to <i>fix it</i>. "</p><p>Wherein Jake Jensen remembers everything clearly and only part of it really happened. Lucky for Al Calavicci, Jensen's memories are the key to finding a lost friend. Too bad Jake has to go through Hell to get him back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story that's been kicking around in my head for about two years. The Beta Branch Big Bang of 2015 finally brought it to light and dragged it from my brain kicking and screaming.
> 
> Huge kudos, props, and virtual cookies to Bess and Jenny for the beta goodness. You girls are fab.

**Stallion’s Gate, New Mexico, 2002**

Jake Jensen wiped at the blood running over his chin and chanced a quick look down the corridor to his left before turning that way and looking for… Hell, for anything. A door that wasn’t a closet, an elevator that didn’t need a thumbprint, a handy exit sign—

—a narrow archway lit dimly by a purple glow at odds with the soft white lights overhead. He grinned and headed toward it, trying to shake off the sense of complete disorientation and just plain _wrongness_ of what was happening. Whatever drug they’d used on him, he was having a hard time shaking it.

He wasn’t even sure where he’d been before he woke up in the bare blue room to find himself lying on a shiny metal table. But damn it, he was covert ops, man; he was going to get out and he was going to find his team, and if he was really lucky, he was going to take down this whole damn complex. Whatever the hell it was for.

> “Captain Jensen?” The voice had been sharp, commanding, and Jake had responded to it instantly, his bleary gaze flashing up to the face of a Navy admiral. His eyes narrowed as he realized that, though the man’s uniform was spotless, his nameplate was conspicuously absent. “Captain Jensen, are you with us?”
> 
> Jake rolled his head to each side a little drunkenly and looked around. The room was empty, except for him and the Admiral. They weren’t stationed near a Naval yard right now, were they? Had he been in a _fight_ at a Naval yard?
> 
> “‘Us’?” he parroted back, sounding dull to his own ears. What the hell was going on here? His body felt weird: thick and slow and desperately out of shape—which was just not possible.
> 
> “Captain, I need to ask you some questions,” the Admiral went on, relentless in that way that only upper echelon officers were. _Never let a guy catch his breath…_ “I need to know all you can tell me about Rakman al Rahkim.”
> 
> “The Desert Devil?” Jake was really _trying_ to track what was going on here, but he felt like his brain was full of glue. What the hell?
> 
> “Can I get medical in here?” the Admiral groused with an edge of concern. The strange request to empty air cleared a few of the cobwebs from Jake’s mind. He looked closer but the guy wasn’t wearing a throat mic. Wall mics, maybe? Intercom? “Did something happen with the leap or what?” He heard a smack of flesh on plastic and something electronic cried out in pain.
> 
> _All right, Jake,_ he told himself firmly, _get it together._ He took another look around, willing his mind to clear. The walls were a thoroughly obnoxious deep blue that was probably meant to be soothing; corrugated vinyl, pod design… Some kind of military facility, obviously… Where was everyone else? If he was in a fight, at the very least, Pooch and Cougar would be here, too. He didn’t brawl alone. “I need to speak to my commanding officer,” he requested, trying to sound deferential.
> 
> “Your commanding officer,” the Admiral said, shoulders clearly relaxing from their military precision now that Jake was making more sense. “Yeah, uh, that’d be Franklin Clay, right?”
> 
> Jake felt a chill run up his spine at the man’s stumble and woke up a little more. “Yes, sir.”
> 
> The Admiral stepped back, and Jake replayed what the man had first asked him. “Rahkim’s an Army target,” Jake grated, less deferential, more menacing. He had a very bad feeling about this place, suddenly. “What’s the Navy’s interest in him?” He pegged the Admiral with a cold look. “And where’s Clay?”
> 
> “Colonel Clay is, uh, currently unavailable, soldier,” the Admiral replied, firming up his voice. “This project is classified, but I can tell you that any information you can give me on your search for al Rahkim is of vital importance.”
> 
> Jake snorted and cracked a smile as he levered himself up onto his elbows. _Oh man._ “I’ll bet,” he replied. This was a sweet setup. The US used Arab operatives to get information in the Middle East all the time. Why wouldn’t the Afghanis use a Caucasian to do their dirty work? “Vital importance to _whom_?”
> 
> Or else Clay was right and the CIA really was just out to screw everyone.
> 
> “I know this doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, Captain,” his companion replied, almost sympathetic. “Please believe me, this is more important than you know.”
> 
> Jake stood up, feeling stiff and… off. But not off enough not to use his height to his advantage over the surprisingly short admiral. Hah. They probably should have done their homework, whoever these people were. There were height requirements in the Navy, after all. “And again, I gotta ask: important to _whom_?”
> 
> And just at that second, the door opened and Jake saw his chance. He slammed a slightly clumsy fist into the Admiral’s face, felling him after a couple of follow-up punches, and jumped for the guard and the guy in scrubs who were just heading into the room. Scrub man went down with one shot, but the guard took a little longer and got in a few hits of his own. Jake could feel blood running down his face from his throbbing nose before the corporal sloughed to the ground and stayed there.
> 
> _Well, great. So… now what?_ he asked himself, looking back at the door to the blue room and spying a control panel on the outside. He hauled the medic and the guard inside and punched a couple of buttons on the panel until the door slid down and closed. With a shrug, he pried the face of the panel off the wall, yanked on what wires he found inside, hefted the sidearm he’d taken off the corporal, and slid through the strangely empty hallways, looking for anything…

Which brought him, again, to the purple room. He slid inside and looked around, a bemused smirk on his face. “Someone watched way too much _Time Patrol_ when he was a kid,” he muttered. The room was like a science fiction control room: the center was dominated by a non-descript, square, metal column, but the rest was all flashing, candy-colored lights and screens with incomprehensible graphs… _Well, wait now…_

The graphs weren’t incomprehensible. They were mappings for flux equations. Einstein-type shit. Jake chuckled. He’d loved the whole idea of quantum travel when he was a kid: Dirac, von Neumann—those guys knew how to reenvision the universe.

“But could they hack V’ger, here?” he whispered, keeping an ear out for any pursuit while he sidled up to the main console and started poking around on the keyboard. The computer was more complicated than most and none of his usual hacks were working. He kept waiting for an alarm to go off, but it was like the computer was just letting him take his time to learn the system. Which was a stupid thought. Computers didn’t think like that—he was still foggy from the drugs or whatever. Finally, just as he was about to move on to another room—find a way out of the complex altogether, maybe—the screen in front of him turned black and then flashed back to life, showing a simple wash of pastel colors.

“ _That entrance gambit was not expected by my mainframe,_ ” a soft female voice murmured. Jake brought up his stolen pistol and searched the room before his brain clued him in to the fact that the lights on the screen had pulsed in time to the words. _Oh, no way!_

“Hello, HAL,” he called softly, an incredulous smile playing on his lips.

“ _Good morning, Dave,_ ” the computer responded, an almost smirk to the far-too-sexy voice. “ _But my name is not HAL._ ”

“Fuck me,” Jake whispered.

“ _I have never seen that entrance gambit used for a system such as my own, Captain Jensen,_ ” the computer repeated its earlier observation and ignored his exclamation. “ _It is… ingenious._ ”

Jake snorted. “Okay,” he conceded with a shrug. “Pretty standard fare for me.” He grinned broadly. “Which sort of makes me ingenious, I guess.”

“ _You are very interesting, yes,_ ” she replied. He’d swear she was purring.

Jake hit the spacebar a couple of times to clear the screen and tapped away at the keyboard, working his way through the directories and hunting for information. “What’s your name, beautiful?” he asked, distracted.

“ _I am called Ziggy,_ ” the computer offered.

“Ziggy, huh,” he said. There was a file called _temporal matrices_. Given the graphs that had been up when he walked in, that had potential—and it was triple encrypted, so it had to be good, right? “What do you do here, Ziggy?” He didn’t know why he was talking to the computer, but he liked her voice, and really, so few of his computers talked back. The file took a minute to crack, but after a few more tricks, he was able to start to read.

“ _I am the guiding and central mainframe for the project._ ”

Jake barely heard it—her—whatever—as his half-sludged brain finally figured out what he was reading. Time travel experiments, temporal interference, shifting timelines… _Four years in the future? No..._ As if to confirm it for himself, he glanced up at the date and time on the top of the screen.

`12:43 am | March 29, 2002`

“Oh, shit… You’re kidding me, right?”

“ _I don’t believe so, Captain,_ ” the computer replied matter-of-factly.

At that very moment, four separate klaxons started to blare and Jake swore, looking around the room for someplace to go—someplace that wasn’t the main hallway, which he figured would be crawling with MPs. _Real_ MPs probably, if his reading of the file he’d just hacked into was right. Real MPs from the fucking _future_.

How the hell had anyone _ever_ gotten funding for a project like this?

The ceiling was high, but walls like this were like ladders if you climbed them often enough. He jumped, catching hold of a seam in the corrugated wall and clawing his way up the ridged surface to an AC grate in the corner. It was a lot harder than it usually was—felt like he was using all the wrong muscles—but he made it. By the time the bloodied and bruised Admiral and his battered corporal walked in, Jake was safely hidden in the vents.

“Ziggy, where the hell is he?” the Admiral barked.

“ _Captain Jensen is currently 3.12 meters directly above you._ ”

“Traitor,” Jake muttered, as the Admiral looked up at the closed grate and the corporal trained a pistol on it.

“Captain, I’m not gonna ask again,” the Admiral said tiredly. Wasn’t really being all that threatening, which was weird. “Just get down from there. We need to talk.”

Well fine, if we were all being non-violent about this… Jake set the grate aside. “Damn right we need to talk,” he called down, dropping to the floor and landing too hard. What the hell? Ten feet was an easy jump for him! “Time travel, really?”

The Admiral pulled him gently to his feet. “You okay?” he asked. It was a weird question to ask a guy who’d just knocked you out and run off to play with your toys.

“Fine,” he replied brusquely, though he was limping as they walked out of the room. His mind was whirling with the implications of what they appeared to be doing here. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“You could’ve just asked,” the older man groused, sounding like he wouldn’t have answered anyway. “Corporal, get him something to wash that blood off his face and take him back to the waiting room. I need to go have a conversation.”

*******

Al really wished Sam had listened to him and installed a few regular old doors around here. He could’ve used the satisfaction of slamming one right now. Instead he heard the timid swish of the pneumatic door closing behind him as he walked into the main control room. Ziggy’s central processing unit stood in the center of the large space and he wondered what Jensen would have thought had he walked in here instead of that secondary alcove. The computer’s laser matrix was still impressive to Al after years of staring at it.

The Captain had already wormed his way into the system, damn it. They’d known he was good when Sam had leaped into him: black ops, master hacker, member of a successful covert team whose speciality was bringing down the guys no one could bring down. Now if Sam could just change their history here...

The kid had a mean left hook, too, and Al’s eye was swelling shut as he stood here. Yeah, Jensen was good, all right. And too darn paranoid, apparently. Al had hoped that showing up in uniform, presenting himself as a military commander right off the bat, would put Jensen more at ease, but it seemed he didn’t trust anyone enough to _be_ put at ease.

“Ziggy, what do you have for me?” he asked testily, hoping for a quick resolution to the leap. The sooner Jake Jensen was out of the project, the better. Why did Sam have to keep leaping into the smart ones?

“ _I have been unable to determine Rakman al Rahkim’s whereabouts using historical means, so Dr. Beckett is attempting to locate his base using Captain Jensen’s computer._ ” Al’s handlink bleeped. “ _I have transferred information on Captain Jensen’s attempt to breach my systems into the handlink. I believe it will help Dr. Beckett to overcome al Rahkim’s security system._ ”

Al smiled. “You _let_ him hack you,” he said with a sigh of relief. It was a good idea, really, and Al was impressed all over again with Ziggy’s self-awareness. She would be terrifying if she wasn’t on their side.

“ _I simply allowed him to offer us information without resistance, Admiral,_ ” the computer corrected smugly. “ _Given Captain Jensen’s profile and highly intelligent, highly curious nature, I believe he discovered enough in his investigations that he may be willing to aid us further if necessary._ ”

“If he doesn’t think he’s just being gaslighted,” Al muttered. But Jensen had been angered by what Ziggy had leaked to him. He believed what was going on, Al could tell. Of the leapees who figured it out, some bought in immediately and some had to be given an alternate scenario they could swallow. Jensen was clearly the first kind, but given his skills and intelligence, that was more a hindrance than a help.

“ _The files I made available should have been clear enough for the captain to assimilate the data easily._ ”

Al nodded. And of course he would—another crazy dreamer added to the mix. “Great, Ziggy. Great. Let me get this to Sam first,” he told her, heading for the Imaging Chamber door. “I’ll deal with Captain Geek later.”

**********

Jake cooled his heels in the obnoxious blue room, his mind reeling, even as he pretty much figured he wasn’t dreaming or being screwed with. This shit was real, shockingly enough.

He wasn’t Clay—it wasn’t like he believed every cocked-up story he was fed, but time travel…? It wasn’t really as crazy an idea as people thought it was. It was just logistically difficult to put one person in two places at the same time. According to the shit he’d just read, they’d overcome that one in a pretty unique way—switch places with someone else. He wasn’t him. He was whoever had “leaped” into him. And he really had to wonder what the hell the guy was doing as him, too.

He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. It wasn’t even _his_ hair, was it? He leaned over to stare into the reflective tabletop again, looking at the dark hair with the ridiculous white streak, the brown eyes and beaten-up visage. He wasn’t bad-looking, but he had the slightly soft face of a guy who’d spent more time in a classroom or a lab than in the real world. Jake wondered who he was, and what he felt like wearing Jake’s own face.

And he really wondered what the hell they thought they were doing! Time travel was not just logistically difficult, but really brutally stupid on a lot of different levels. They could destroy the world here—pretty effectively, too. Change one little thing, right? The grassy knoll?

“Damn.” He swallowed hard on a rush of pure fear that came from being _way_ fucking out of his league, then snorted at his own insanity. “Wonder what Clay’d think of _this_ conspiracy?” he muttered.

The door to the blue room opened and Jake looked up to see the Admiral walk in, holding an icepack to his eye. Now that Jake’s head was on a little straighter, he could take in more details of the man. He had salt and pepper hair and was probably pushing seventy, but still had a look about him that said he could beat the crap out of most people, given the right excuse. “Scrappy,” Pooch would have called him. He looked vaguely familiar, too, like Jake had seen him in a textbook somewhere….

“I could bring you up on charges, Captain,” the Admiral barked, his nasal, pained voice settling Jake’s nerves and putting a grin on his own messed up face (well, the one he was wearing, anyway). Never let it be said Jake Jensen didn't give as good as he got. “Assaulting a senior officer, infiltrating a top secret facility…”

Jake nodded, pulling on every bit of calm he could gather. Right now, that wasn’t a lot. “You could,” he allowed blithely, leaning forward and ticking off his talking points on his fingers. “Except for three things: you’re Navy, not Army, so I don’t answer to you; _you brought me here_ , so it’s not exactly infiltration, is it?” He leveled an almost deadly stare at the older man, full of anger and fear and amazement and disgust. “And am I even still in the corps in 2002?” He snorted. "Hell, am I even _alive_ in 2002?"

The Admiral flinched at that last question and Jake had a sudden panicked feeling that he’d died already—that the rest of the Losers were gone, too. He had his answer when the man just stared at him sadly and stood in silence for a long moment. “Found a lot in the database, did you?" Funny, he didn’t seem too surprised, or even all that annoyed.

“I’m sure you read the part of my file where I’m one of the best hackers the US Army has to offer?” He grinned coldly. “That, and the lovely lady likes me.” The Admiral smirked in return and Jake’s stomach dropped in sudden realization. _Oh, come on!_ “She _let_ me hack her, didn’t she?” He shook his head. “God damn it—never trust a woman!”

“Ain’t that the truth,” the Admiral muttered under his breath.

“Look, whatever the hell Ziggy is,” Jake said, pacing, “she’s amazing. And terrifying, and I don’t know what the hell you people were thinking when you created her or this project.” He ran a hand through the unfamiliar hair on his head.

“Captain,” the Admiral tried again. “I promise, you’re here for a very good reason. I can’t tell you, obviously—”

Jake snorted. “Why not?” he asked brutally. “It’s not like you’re going to let me go back anyway. How could you possibly, now I’ve found out your dirty little secret?” He smiled a tight smile. “Though if you are going to let me live and send me home, can I have the scores for the last few super bowls? Coug and I could make a killing.” He stopped cold, remembering that they were already dead. He might be stuck here forever. Alone...

He was surprised to see the Admiral’s eyes soften and wondered what had shown on the face he was wearing. “We’re not going to kill you, Captain. And we’re not keeping you here, either.” The guy sighed, leaning tiredly against the table, and Jake surprised himself by feeling a rush of sympathy for him. “As soon as Sam finishes what he needs to do, you’ll be back with your team in your own time and you won’t even remember this conversation.”

Jake wished he could verify that. Sounded like the guy was telling the truth, but really, he’d gotten pretty used to being lied to since he started black-ops work. _As soon as Sam finishes what he needs to do…_ So what the hell was he doing?

“Why are you doing this?” he asked instead. “And why do I have to have anything to do with it? I mean, you do get how dangerous the whole idea of this is, right? You watched all the good scifi?”

The Admiral chuckled a little despairingly. “Trust me, kid,” he murmured as he looked at Jake but saw someone else. It struck Jake that this guy Sam that he was wearing must be a friend of the Admiral’s. Had to be confusing for the guy. “This wasn’t quite how we imagined it.”

“Well maybe it’s time to stop, then, yeah?” Jake stilled. This whole time, he hadn't been able to remember what he’d been doing before waking up in this room. That should have worried him more than it did, but honestly, he’d had _a lot_ more important things on his mind. But now… “You’re after the information on al Rahkim, right? The hack into his system?” He sat down, really feeling the possibilities for a minute. “What are you going to change? What—what happened the first time?” He covered his face with his hands. “Fuck, I was right. You really could destroy the world from here.”

“Or save it.”

The Admiral’s soft, cold response had Jake looking up in shock. “You mean—?”

“You didn’t find al Rahkim.” The old man seemed to come to a decision that it looked like he rarely came to. He probably figured it didn’t matter if he told Jensen everything, since Jake would apparently forget the whole damn thing later anyway. “One of his lieutenants, a guy named al-Fadhil, overthrew him in a power struggle, and you and your team—” He ran his head through his hair. “Look, it’s complicated, but things that shouldn’t have happened happened, and....”

“Now we’re dead.” Jake whispered, watching his companion nod briefly.

Silence stretched between them as the meaning of the Admiral’s words sank in.

“You’re shitting me,” Jake whispered in wonder. “All because _I_ couldn’t find one Afghani warlord?”

“It’s the little things, Captain Jensen,” his companion replied with a fatalistic smile.

The speakers in the room blared to life. “ _Admiral, we need you in the Imaging Chamber. Ziggy says the probabilities are changing._ ”

The Admiral straightened. “Oh, thank God. Sam must have found the bastard.” He looked Jake up and down. “I hope I don’t see you again, Captain.” he said, punching buttons on a scifi film prop in his hand. The door opened and Jake didn’t even think of going through. “I’m on my way, Gooshie.”

Jake glared at the door as it closed. “What?! Seriously, you’re going to leave me with _that_!?” Silence fell and he was left completely alone to consider his fate. He _sort of_ believed he was going to get home. It would make sense that he’d have to go back once this Sam guy finished his business. The guy couldn’t be him forever. And he sure as hell didn’t want to be that guy….

“Hey Ziggy?” he asked quietly, hoping she’d answer him. She had to have access to the speakers in here, right?

“ _Yes, Captain Jensen?_ ” she asked pleasantly.

He grinned at the almost flirty tone, but immediately frowned as a pain started in his stomach. He tried to ignore it. It felt like it’d been a day since he got here and he hadn’t eaten a thing, so it stood to reason, right? “What do I look like? I mean, like, what does _this guy_ really look like?” He shrugged. “Looking at him in a tabletop is a little distorting.” He wasn’t really sure why he wanted to know, but it seemed important.

“ _I will attempt to show you, Captain,_ ” she replied, surprising him with her willingness to oblige him. “ _But the holographic functions available in this room are keyed to the Admiral’s brainwaves. It is unlikely that you will be able to see them._ ”

“Huh.” Cool. It seemed like she was right, as nothing appeared for a minute. He put a hand to his stomach as it cramped a little more, considering telling her to just forget it. But then an image flickered into life before him and showed him a much clearer image of the slightly roughed up face he was borrowing. This Sam was a handsome guy and Jake could place his age in his forties, now that he could really look at him. He reached a hand up to touch his sore and swollen nose, and the image did the same, like one of those old Charlie Chaplin gags where his mirror image has a mind of its own. He’d been right before. His own nose wasn’t nearly that big.

“Wow,” he breathed, a cramp catching him on the exhale. Damn, he was starting to feel like crap. He wondered how everything worked here. So he asked. “So what happens now?”

“ _I’m afraid I don’t understand the question, Captain,_ ” Ziggy replied.

“This… the leaping.” It was all too crazy, suddenly. Jake could believe an awful lot of weird shit—thinking on his feet in the strangest of circumstances made him a good black ops soldier—but this…?

“The Admiral’s not lying, is he?” He wondered if _Ziggy_ could lie to him. “I’m going to get to go home, right?”

He’d barely gotten the question out when the pain rushed up the scale in intensity with a suddenness that scared the shit out of him. He bent double, a headache flaring into life to go with the gut fire. _Shit,_ this hurt! Shit!

“ _Goodbye, Captain Jensen,_ ” Ziggy murmured, ratcheting his panic up as he flashed back to every killer Artificial Intelligence movie he’d ever seen. She _could_ lie, clearly, the murderous box of relays—he was going to bite it in the future...

The world around him was swallowed by a painfully bright, blue lightning—

 

**Stuttgart Army Base, Germany, 1998**

—and he blinked, looking at his computer dumbly. God, his head hurt.

“The fuck?” he asked himself quietly. He looked down at his Superman boxers and the four—five—empty German-language Mountain Dew bottles on his desk, then at the time on the computer. It was 5:38 am, and the map on his screen wasn’t immediately recognizable. It took him a minute, but he finally remembered what the hell he’d been doing.

“Great, Jensen,” he muttered to himself. “You fell asleep hacking. Seriously? What are you, ten?” He stretched his arms up over his head and perused the information on the screen before him, dropping his hands to his keyboard in shock.

“Damn.” He noted the coordinates for the tiny complex on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. “Al Rahkim, you son of a bitch.”

Jake seriously didn’t remember finding the warlord’s hideout, but it wasn’t the first time he’d lost track of things while doing a hack of this complexity. Hell, sometimes he even forgot to eat. Which reminded him— _damn_ , he was hungry.

His phone rang, jangling the darkness around him and he jumped at it. “Yeah,” he replied, still feeling like he was thinking through quicksand. “Jensen.”

“Good morning. Did you finally pass out in front of your computer?” Clay’s voice cut through the haze slightly, and Jake tucked the receiver into his shoulder and reached over to his mini fridge to grab another Mountain Dew.

“Um, yeah,” he replied, a little sheepish. “This isn’t as easy as it looks, you know?”

“Doesn’t look easy,” Clay responded. “Glad you’re the geek, not me.” Jake had only been on the colonel’s team for a year, but he’d gotten used to Clay’s special mix of deadly intensity and amused relaxation. “Any sign of al Rahkim?” _Speaking of deadly intensity,_ Jensen thought with a smirk as he popped open a bottle. “We’re slated to move out in twenty-four hours and I’m not going to Afghanistan for nothing.”

Jake looked at the map, smiling as he took a swig of wonderful, brain-stimulating caffeine. That should help his headache. “We’re good, Colonel,” he said. “I’ll send the information to Op Control.”

“Good job,” Clay murmured. “Took you less time than Pooch and Roque thought it would.”

“They just don’t appreciate the wonder of Jensen,” Jake replied, basking in it.

“You better get your cut from Cougar. He was betting on this morning at the latest.”

Jake grinned. “Thanks for the intel, boss.”

“Anytime. Oh, and Jensen?” Clay ordered, that exasperated Dad sound to his voice. “Put some damn pants on.”

Jake looked down at his boxers again and smirked. What could he say? He thought better in his skivvies.

********  
to be continued


	2. Chapter 2

**Stallions Gate, New Mexico, 2002**

Al took a deep breath to settle his stomach from the usual hologram-induced vertigo as he stepped out of the Imaging Chamber. Sam had leaped as soon as Ziggy confirmed that al-Fadhil’s rise to power had been stopped. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been caught in the ensuing chaos—at least not that could be documented. She was unable to track al-Fadhil’s current whereabouts, which meant he was somewhere out there causing trouble, but at least the events brought about when he assassinated Rahkim and took over his arms operation in the original timeline had never happened in the current one.

“Ziggy, where are we at?” he asked. He didn’t know why he bothered, since the answer would be the same as every other time. He guessed sometimes the repetition was soothing.

“ _I am attempting to locate Dr. Beckett,_ ” she replied predictably, following it up with the expected update on the leapee’s altered future, though he’d received it on the handlink already. “ _Captain Jensen and his covert operations unit spent eighteen months in Afghanistan after successfully eliminating Rakman al Rahkim._ ”

Al nodded. Hell of a lot better than the original timeline, where Jensen and his whole team died in a “training accident” in the Khyber Pass four months after the failed hack. Given that al-Fadhil had died around the same time, a training accident seemed less likely than them dying in the operation that took out the Afghan warlord.

Al took a minute, as he did after every leap, to sift slowly through his memories, picking out the ones that happened in the pre-leap timeline instead of the current one. Beeks, the Project’s psychiatrist and his personal mental watchdog, was always fascinated by how he could just _know_ which memories were which—as fascinated as she was by the fact that he didn’t have a psychotic break as a result of having so many different ones in his head. She called it “Protective Compartmentalization”: the ability to shove the old memories to the back of his mind in favor of the new ones.

Al just called it survival.

Thinking through the original timeline, there’d been a small nuclear detonation in the already-irradiated ghost town of Pripyat, Ukraine, he remembered, a couple of months before 9/11. But it had been put down to the work of pro-Russian rebels and dismissed. That hadn’t happened in the current timeline—al Rahkim must have been the dealer for that bomb. Other than that, not too many huge changes, really. But they were huge for Jensen and his people. 

“He’s all right?” It was weird, but he actually did care. Jensen had been an okay guy, felonious assault notwithstanding. And he’d understood the Project with very few clues to go on—enough to point out how crazy they all were for doing it, at least. He had chutzpah, as Ruthie would say.

“ _Captain Jensen is still serving under Colonel Franklin Clay in the United States Army,_ ” Ziggy offered. “ _His status is classified._ ”

Al grinned. “Yeah, kiddo, join the club.”

“ _A copy of his file has been sent to your confidential email, Admiral,_ ” she said quietly. Al looked up into her laser matrix in surprise. “ _He will appear on the watchlist from now on._ ”

Huh. Ziggy didn’t usually take that kind of initiative. Al had a watchlist, sure: leapees who he’d gotten to know a little during the leap. Ones he wanted to keep an eye on. Much as he’d liked the guy, sort of, Jensen wasn’t the type to be on that list—hell, the leap had only been eighteen hours long! “You have a reason for that, Ziggy?” he asked after a moment.

“ _As you and Dr. Beckett were finalizing the leap, Captain Jensen asked what he looked like in Dr. Beckett’s body._ ” She waited a couple beats, as theatrical as Sam was—which stood to reason, being his creation and all. “ _I showed him._ ”

Al took a minute to process that. “With a hologram?” he clarified. “In the Waiting Room?”

“ _Yes, Admiral._ ”

Jensen had seen… To see one of Ziggy’s neural holograms—which were the only ones they used in the Waiting Room, for security’s sake—Jensen had to have similar brain waves to his own. They’d never encountered anyone like that, though there had to be some people out there who fit the bill. They’d found a couple with close matches to Sam’s brain waves, after all, but never Al’s…

“Yeah,” he muttered after a moment, considering the possibilities. “Yeah, keep him on the watchlist.” He headed out the door toward his office, hearing the computer call after him softly.

“ _Of course, Admiral._ ”

*********

**Khyber Pass, Afghanistan 1998**

Once al Rahkim was eliminated and his lieutenants scattered on the Afghan dust, Jake Jensen didn’t give another thought to that hack he didn’t quite remember. Honestly, there was just too damn much to do.

The Losers stayed in Afghanistan as ordered, chasing down as many of al Rahkim’s lackeys as they could. A few of them went to ground, but the team got most of the rats that’d jumped from the sinking, flaming, melting, and ultimately exploding ship that was the premier arms network in the eastern part of the country.

Four months after the hack, Jensen and his team bedded down in a cave not far from one of al Rahkim’s strongholds. They’d check it out in the light of day, but it was likely abandoned now, like all his other locations.

“Looks like something out of a movie,” Jake said, staring up at the cliff-top fort. Built of stone and surrounded by fences, it was a hell of a place to hole up. A single road was carved into the cliffside, but Jensen was willing to bet there was a bolt hole somewhere. A well outlet, maybe. No palace was impregnable.

“Yeah, well, it’s a ghost town now,” Roque said, satisfaction dripping from him. “Last thermal satellite scan showed zero action.” He chuckled coldly. “Nothing left but the rats.”

Jake shuddered and lay down on his bedroll, the day’s long march pulling him quickly toward sleep. “I hate rats.”

> _Jake sat next to the children, wishing they could have had a few more rest stops along the way. The kids were all beyond exhausted and needed to get the hell out of the desert, and the Losers’ evac didn’t seem to care._
> 
> _But Clay sure as shit did. “Now you listen to me, God damn it!” Jake’s CO growled into his headset. “We’ve got two dozen kids out here who’ve been on a forced march for twenty-seven hours straight!”_
> 
> _“Twenty-four,” Jake whispered to the little boy who had leaned across his lap when they stopped this time and had since fallen asleep. “But hey, I’m not above a little exaggeration every once in a while.”_
> 
> _“Now put that bird on the ground, son!” Clay was continuing. “You take the passengers and I’ll take the heat.”_
> 
> _Loading them into the chopper didn’t take long. The kids were only too ready to get to freedom. “ **All right, kids,** ” Jake told them, his Pashto nearly flawless after so much time in the north country. “ **You’re going for a ride! Squeeze in and hold on tight!** ”_
> 
> _The blackhawk lifted off, and Jake sat at the radio to make sure the helicopter’s pilot didn’t rat them out for evacuating the civilians instead of themselves._
> 
> _“Chopper crew’s playin’ ball, sir,” he assured Clay, switching over to International Military Channel 2 out of habit, making sure there was no one else in the area, besides the Pakistani Mig that was running support for the evac. “I’m getting something from the Mig too.” He parsed the thickly accented English of the Pakistani fighter pilot. “Sounds like…”_
> 
> _“ **...acquire target and eliminate. Understood.** ”_
> 
> _“Oh shit,” he whispered. “You gotta listen to this!” he called to Clay as he yanked the headset. The transmission came through the speakers, tinny and cold and sounding like death._
> 
> _“ **...Max—Cobra One. Bandit locked. Twelve o’clock low.** ”_
> 
> _“No,” Clay whispered. Jake looked past his boss’s horrified gaze and locked eyes on Bandit One, flying south toward freedom. “No…”_
> 
> _The replying voice out of the speaker was clearly, brutally American. “Understood, Cobra One. Kill Bandit.”_
> 
> _Fuck, no!_
> 
> _“No,” Jake murmured, an echo of Clay as first one missile and then a game-ending second hit a fucking helicopter full of innocent goddamn kids! “No, no, no, nonononono!”_

Jake shot off his bedroll into the middle of the frigid desert night, bathed in sweat with tears running down his face. His eyes were instantly drawn to the cave entrance, beyond which he could see the cliff-top dwelling above them, outlined in the thick stars of a lightless sky. There was nothing there. No guards. No life. No helicopter burning in the rocks while Cougar screamed in anguish in a way Jake never wanted to hear. Ever. 

“Jensen?” Cougar’s calm, normal, wide-awake voice had Jake spinning toward the other side of the wide cave mouth. The Mexican sniper sat cross-legged on the ground, rifle cradled in his arms as he kept watch. “You okay?”

Jake ran a hand over his face as he tried to banish the dream. He pulled the hand back in surprise at the tears that still flowed. 

_Fuck._

“Ah, yeah, man." Jake swallowed hard in the darkness. “Had a whack dream—and not the good kind.” He was usually willing to tell Coug anything, but a nightmare vision of his friend’s hollow, silent, horrified gaze prevented him, this time. “Just… the desert getting to me, I guess.” He looked back at his bedroll and the rest of the team who slept on, oblivious. Hell if he was going to be able to sleep now. He reached down and grabbed his sidearm, sliding it into his holster. “I can take over for you, if you want to go ahead and bed down.”

Cougar was Cougar, of course. He looked Jake up and down, shrugged, and said, “I’m awake.” He gestured to the ground next to him and Jake settled there quietly. “Have you heard from your sister yet? Did Beth get into that advanced preschool?”

Jake smiled. This was why Cougar was his best friend—he knew when to push and when to distract. Jake patted him on the back lightly in thanks as he tried to forget this, too.

“Yeah. Passed the entrance exam with flying colors,” he said, trying to relax and come down from the terror of the dream. “No surprise, of course—she _is_ a Jensen.”

*************

**Near La Paz, Bolivia, August 2002**

The dream of that burning helicopter in Afghanistan proved hard to forget. It came back to Jake from time to time, though never anywhere near as vivid as that first night, thank God. Over the months and years, it was joined by others that made even less sense. 

They were vague-but-worrying-memory type dreams—or worse, things-happening- _right-now_ -that-he-couldn’t-stop type dreams: running for a crashed and flaming pontoon plane on Montserrat, praying Pooch was alive in the wreckage; trying to outrun an RPG outside Doha with Cougar hanging off the side of the transport...

It wasn’t just dreams, either. Sometimes it was like a whack version of déjà vu. Because they'd had to deploy to Afghanistan as soon as Jake found al Rahkim, Pooch and Jolene didn't talk baby-making until the team got back Stateside right before the turn of the millennium. They'd spent almost half of their married life separated. Which made Jake's idea that the two of them had kids, when they clearly didn't, odd to say the least.

And Roque, who had always been kind of dangerous and suspect, became something more menacing, somehow. He wasn’t the fluffiest guy in the unit, anyway, but he seemed… more dangerous, though damned if Jake could remember enough of the dreams or feelings to figure out why. Whatever. Basically, Jake began giving him a wider berth, but nothing more. 

It was weird, but Jake’s mind was a weird damn place anyway, so mostly he actively ignored the dreams. He’d been in diapers when he became an expert at forgetting shit that could drive him insane—his not-so-doting parents saw to that—so he tried not to let the things that happened in the THERE in his mind affect his HERE. Because HERE was pretty friggin’ sweet, all things considered.

Until one terrifying, soul-killing day in Bolivia. Until 25 kids were murdered on the whim of an asshole with more power than heart. Shot down because they weren’t supposed to be on that evac—the Losers were. It was _exactly_ like the dream he’d been having off and on for three years, only different. Because it was real.

That night, hidden in the jungle with his team—dead as far as the rest of the world was concerned, with his dogtags melting in the heat of smoldering lives—Jake screamed himself awake to a familiar image of THERE: freezing desert and burning children and a deadly, haunted look on Cougar’s face. 

He looked up into the fucked-over reality of HERE to find that self-same haunted look—and God, it was so, so much worse in person. Cougar sat in the dark, not unlike the way he’d done when Jake had had the dream that first time in Afghanistan. But there was no comforting glance, no understanding smile, no sad platitudes to ease the brutal, horrible reality. Just a pain radiating from his best friend. A pain that Jake somehow knew would rob Cougar of what few words he might have used. The sniper clearly hadn’t even tried to sleep.

Jake swallowed the need to throw up and decided to follow Cougar’s lead, sitting next to him at the edge of the hole they’d squirreled away in. They didn't talk about Beth and her soccer team and their chances of making the playoffs—Jake would likely never see Beth again. Fuck, Pooch had just spilled the beans that Jolene was pregnant. He'd never meet his kid.

Jake shivered in the oppressive heat and spat acid from the back of his throat and said nothing.

What was there to say?

*************

**Stallions Gate, New Mexico, August 2002**

Al Calavicci slumped into his office chair and rubbed his eyes. He was too old for this. Sam had just leaped out of a trip to the honest-to-God Bermuda Triangle, which would have been a kick in the pants if Ziggy hadn’t lost contact with him— _twice_ —and forecasted increasingly high probabilities of his death for almost the whole damn thing.

Breathing deeply, Al stared at nothing until he felt the last dregs of adrenaline drain away. Feeling marginally better, he turned to his computer terminal and called up the latest news feed.

> **Bolivian Government Accuses American Special Forces of ‘Appalling Murders’**  
>  La Paz, Bolivia, AP — The Bolivian government today issued a censure of the United States Army, claiming that a US Special Forces team showed “horrifying disregard for the safety of more than two dozen Bolivian children” when they loaded the children on a helicopter after a failed drug raid. The helicopter was shot out of the sky by unknown assailants, and all aboard were killed in the resulting crash…

Al shook his head at another senseless loss of too many lives and wondered what the _real_ story behind that operation was. It was never cut and dried with the military, as he knew only too well. He sighed. The news was too depressing today. He’d read it tomorrow. 

Instead, he opened the weekly briefing on his watchlist and stopped dead, his mouth going dry at the first entry:

`JENSEN, JACOB (US Army SF) [4/10/1998]—killed in helicopter crash near La Paz, Bolivia, August 13, 2002. Special Forces Team (deceased) accused of unauthorized military action, resulting in the deaths of 25 children and 7 US Army personnel.`

Al dropped his head into his hands for a long, painful moment of utter futility. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt it: that wondering why the hell God or time or fate or _whatever_ was leading them around by the noses and letting bad things happen anyway. 

“Hell,” he whispered. He needed a drink.

Too damn bad he’d given the stuff up.

*************

**Los Angeles, January 2003**

The almost six months since Jake and the rest of the Losers died had sucked. In a way that nothing else had ever sucked before, which for Jake was saying something. The images from THERE cropped up more frequently as time went on, and Jake got used to waking up in a cold sweat, trying to figure out what was real and what wasn’t. He worried that something really bad happened THERE, because he found himself trusting anyone—well, anyone who wasn’t Coug, Clay, or Pooch—less and less.

Jake never explained THERE to the guys: that whacked-out otherworld he thought of in all caps. It was his own insanity, and they had enough of that in their lives as it was. He just tried to keep it together and stick THERE where it belonged: in the back of his head with all the rest of the garbage.

The night after Max escaped them in LA—after Roque betrayed them and paid with his life and Pooch was shot through in both knees and Clay had plunged into the harbor and saved the city from… some weird killer sci-fi-type bomb, Jake had another one of those dreams. Like he didn’t have enough to worry about.

> _Pooch, tied to a radiator in a radiation zone, his image grainy over the camera feed from a piss-poor ancient bomb-sniffing robot. Bloody and missing a finger and mad as hell. Jake had looked up at his CO and seen a fire in his eyes._
> 
> _“Let’s fly.” Because Clay was just as mad. Frickin’ Mama bear with a cub in the hunter’s sights._
> 
> _“Easy, Rambo,” Stegler said, just the sound of his voice making Jake tighten up. “There’s only six of us and Christ only knows how many guarding that place.”_
> 
> _“I know,” Clay answered simply. “But it’s **Pooch**.”_
> 
> _And it was. And they all should have known he’d be able to take care of himself._
> 
> _And Roque should have known not to threaten Jolene and the girls._
> 
> _“Motherfucker!” Pooch screamed, pain and anger making his voice crack more than the crappy connection did. “You don’t touch them! They don’t know shit, I swear, you don’t touch them—!”_
> 
> _“Be cool, Ponyboy,” Jake whispered as he hacked into the motor center of the bomb sniffer he was using to watch this whole thing. The old robot’s gun was loaded, thank God. He willed Pooch to look at him, flashing the ready light and hoping Roque was too into his torture monologue to notice._
> 
> _“Come on, Pooch, come on!” he muttered._
> 
> _“See you in Hell, Pooch,” Roque said at the same time._
> 
> _Finally, Pooch glanced toward the bomb sniffer; held his gaze there._
> 
> _Jake fell over himself punching out the Morse code as fast as he could: G-E-T H-I-M B-A-C-K. S-H-O-T-G-U-N._
> 
> _Pooch smiled and started taunting Roque, and Jake held his breath and let the man have his fun. His finger hovered over the space bar on his laptop like he was waiting for the perfect shot on the last alien in fucking Space Invaders._
> 
> _“...just what do you think those things use to blow a detonator out of a lump of plastique?” Pooch was in the middle of asking. He was still baiting the asshole they’d thought was a friend, discussing exactly how a bomb-sniffer worked—as if Roque shouldn’t have known. Jake saw Roque, way too fucking late, turn toward the robot._
> 
> _“That’s right, motherfucker,” Pooch whispered with a harsh glee. “Shotgun.”_
> 
> _Jake pressed the spacebar gently. “Boo,” he snapped, hoping it was loud enough for Roque to hear as the asshole was slammed through the window by a high-caliber bullet to fall fifteen floors to the ground._
> 
> _“Jesus, Jensen.” Clay shook his head. “Never figured you’d be the one to finally pull the trigger on Roque.”_
> 
> _Jake leaned back, satisfied. “Still waters, baby. Fuckbag had it coming.”_

“Huh,” he murmured in the darkness, surprised that a dream of THERE would actually end pleasantly, for once. It was oddly satisfying to know that in some universe, he’d paid Roque back for what he’d done. 

He sat up from his pitiful nest of pillows on the floor of the cut-rate hotel and looked over at the only bed in the room. Pooch was lying there peacefully, sleeping off the morphine Cougar had purloined to help him through the pain while the sniper had fixed up both bullet wounds. 

His mind tried to wash away the visions of THERE with a too-vivid memory of less than a day ago: Pooch had been too pissed to kneel to their captors, of course, and the answer had been a bullet in each knee. He was going to be fine, thank God—the bullets hadn’t hit bone, hadn't done too much damage—but he was going to be galumphing along on crutches for a while. Which served him right for not taking the path of least resistance to begin with.

Stepping over Cougar—who was sleeping deeper than he’d slept since Bolivia, it seemed—Jake carefully stood over the man on the bed and, instead of focusing on his knees, counted fingers: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten.

“Jensen, what the hell are you staring at?” The drugged-thick voice had Jake guiltily darting his eyes up to meet Pooch’s in the dim moonlight.

“Nothing, man,” Jake assured him in a soft whisper. “Just checking that you’re still in one piece, you know?” he shrugged, wiping away the image of Pooch’s left hand and the pinky that had been snipped off with a wire cutter THERE. “You need anything? Doing okay?”

Pooch shifted unconsciously and hissed at the pain. “Shot through both legs, J—not okay!” His eyes closed and he started to drift back to sleep almost immediately. “What the hell kind of a question is that to ask…?”

Jake ran his hands over his face and settled into the chair beside the bed, careful not to step on Cougar. He was going insane—he was seriously counting his buddy’s fucking _fingers_ because of a dream. Fucking THERE. He took a cleansing breath, shoving it all away. Whatever. He could forget that, too. It was done for now and Pooch had ten fingers HERE. At least they’d all survived. 

The wall behind the bed started thumping rhythmically and Jake sighed. He still didn’t trust Aisha—the bitch shot him, after all. He’d never trust her, just on basic principle—but she’d saved their asses this time. He shook off the horrible feeling that the Aisha from THERE had a secret none of them wanted to know and prayed that the Aisha HERE didn’t have the same secret. He knew she and Clay would have it out over her father’s death at some point, but the way they went at it like bunnies, maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as he worried it would be.

“Remember the one who shot him _while_ they were fucking, _hermano_ ,” Cougar mumbled lazily in the darkness. He always could read Jake’s mind—which should have had Coug completely terrified right about now. “This one is more volatile. A lot more.”

Jake snorted again and kicked lightly at his best friend before relaxing and resting the back of his head on the top of the chair. Staring up at the ceiling, he tried to remind himself again that they were okay. All of them. 

His blood ran unaccountably cold. Sure, _they_ were okay, but so was Max.

********  
to be continued


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story is finally done! 
> 
> So I'm now going to post twice weekly instead of once. Tuesdays and Fridays is the plan.
> 
> You have no idea how glad I am that this is done!

**Kirkland AFB, Albuquerque, NM, June 2003**

“I’m afraid we can’t grant you access to the facility, Admiral.” The Air Force general's face was stony and unforgiving. “Project Quantum Leap has been shut down. All materials, files, and base buildings are to be sealed preparatory to decommissioning.”

Al Calavicci slapped his cover against his leg, the brim of the hat cutting into his thigh. “You can’t decommission that computer, Colonel,” he begged. “You don’t understand! Ziggy is the key to finding Dr. Beckett!”

General Markerson’s face took on that sad, pitying cast that everyone got these days. Pissed the crap out of Al, every single time. “Admiral, I know it’s hard for you to accept. I get that you two were close.” He spoke as one would to a child, or the way people used to speak to his sister Trudy, like she was too damn stupid to understand. “Dr. Beckett has disappeared. He’s gone. Probably—”

Al nodded doggedly. “And he’s going to stay gone if you shut down that computer!”

The general rode over him. “—probably vaporized by the very experiment that you are advocating we continue!” He ran a hand through his buzzcut. “Admiral, how much longer did you expect the Joint Chiefs to allow this to continue?”

“Not long enough, apparently,” Al muttered coldly. He walked out the door without waiting for a dismissal and the heat of a New Mexico summer day hit him like a brick wall as he exited the building.

Three months. Three damn months they’d let him search for Sam, and now they were just leaving Beckett twisting in the wind. Gooshie had been reassigned to some secret Air Force project in Colorado Springs. The trusted Navy crew Al had had with him at Stallion’s Gate had been shut out and sent on their way. And now the damned _Air Force_ was in charge!

And they were going to shut Ziggy down.

“No way,” he whispered to himself. He pulled out his phone and hit speed dial. “There’s gotta be a way around this.” The call went to voicemail. “Damn it—Gooshie, it’s me.” He headed for his car, digging his keys out while holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder. “Do we have an offsite copy of the initial code for Ziggy? I need to know if Sam input something called the Hidey-Hole Protocol before he leaped. Call me back.”

He’d never thought to check the antiquated subroutine. It was more a joke between the two of them than anything else. A sort of what if scenario. Well, this was certainly ‘what if’, wasn’t it?

“I won’t stop looking for you, Sam,” he murmured, firing up the engine and speeding for the base’s main gate. “I promise you that.”

*************

**Pripyat, Ukraine, July 2001**

“ ** _I think we should go back,_** ” he told Anja quietly, speaking Russian because she was smart enough to know two languages but he’d never managed to really learn Ukrainian in the time his family had lived in Radynka. The decrepit buildings around them were too much like the apocalypse, Pripyat a radiological nightmare of Russian engineering. It was, ultimately, his people’s fault that so much of Ukraine still glowed with radiation.

Anja was mad at her mother, he knew that, but perhaps this had gone too far. The rich, powerful politician had claimed he was no good for her Anja—he was a Russian boy, useless and lazy. But he loved Anja, and she, him. They could leave, Anja had said that night, in tears from the fight that was one argument too many.

Did they have to come this way, though? Escaping to Belarus—through the uninhabited radiation zone so that Anja could not be recognized as her mother's daughter—was not the way to do this. He knew, somehow, that that would be disastrous.

“ ** _Anja, please,_** ” he begged, a familiar pull of _this-is-your-purpose_ telling him they had to leave this place. “ ** _Anja, I love you._** ” He put his hand on hers and she slowed the car, let it roll to a stop, and turned to look at him. Buildings left to rot years ago stood silent and waited for them to make their decision. “ ** _We can make it work,_** ” he promised her. “ ** _Please, let’s just go home._** ”

Anja’s tear-stained face crumpled and she sobbed, falling against him.

“ ** _I can’t go back to her, Alyosha,_** ” she wept. He held her tight and whispered nothings and waited until she calmed.

“ ** _Then we will leave,_** ” he promised, knowing that was the right answer—knowing it was what they were meant to do—but somehow feeling there should be someone else telling him how to do it. The memories came and went, as they sometimes did, and he swallowed them down. For right now, right here, they were not his life. “ ** _We will leave, but not like this._** ”

Anja sniffed deeply, rubbing the tears from her face and nodding doggedly. “ ** _Okay,_** ” she whispered roughly. She ground the gears and turned the car back toward the east. He felt a familiar weight begin to lift from his chest. “ ** _Okay._** "

“ ** _Let’s be quick,_** ” he said impulsively. “ ** _This place is dead, and we want to live._** ”

That made Anja smile and he smiled, too, as she floored it and left the edge of the abandoned city behind. He looked out the window, surprised to see a helicopter flying fast away from the center of town, headed north into the radiation preserves.

“ ** _You’ll be all right,_** ” he told Anja, a tingle of lightning flaring in his bones. He was going home.

  

_As the leap took him, he remembered that he had no home._

_He was Sam Beckett, and this was his existence. Leaping from life to life to make a difference for those who needed a push in the right direction. He’d had a home once, been grounded—Al, a friend, a name he remembered only as the smell of cigars and the feeling of help and safety—but he was alone now, his information coming instinctively as he lived the lives of those who needed him. When he was them, he remembered nothing but what they remembered. When he was traveling between them, he was tired and he ached, except in those brief moments of rest in a bar called Al’s Place, that wasn’t Al’s and wasn’t home and never would be._

_The ache grew unexpectedly, suddenly,_ unbearably, _as the lightning that marked his usual travels was shot through with the violence of a second sun. A shock wave—and how it hit him, he couldn’t have said, buffered as he was by the leaping that marked his world—slammed him to the side and cast him roughly into darkness._

He lay panting, trying desperately to catch his breath, not bothering to figure out where he was just yet. He stared blankly at the television across the room from him and let its sound filter into his mind.

“ _Max, the de facto president-for-life of New Jerusalem, has claimed responsibility for the shock detonation of a nuclear weapon in the abandoned city of Pripyat last week._ ”

He sat up on a sofa, a bottle of beer spilled out on the floor beside him.

“ _The UN Security Council will meet later this week to discuss their response to the sudden emergence of New Jerusalem as not only a new sovereign nation, but now apparently also a nuclear rogue state._ ” The television showed an off-shore oil rig in the middle of land and he tried to connect it to something that made sense. _Nuclear blast… Pripyat…_ He almost remembered—

“ _Meanwhile, the death toll from the Persian Gulf tsunami is now believed to have topped fifty thousand. Appeals for aid have led to an unprecedented response from the international community—_ ”

 _Tsunami?_ His head was pounding as he cast about for something to anchor him. The room was a mess, small and littered with trash and pizza boxes and, especially, beer bottles. He levered himself up to his feet and tottered over to the pitted mirror above the fireplace that was crumbling in the corner.

The face looking back at him wasn’t his—not that he knew what he looked like. Or who he was. He just knew that this wasn't him and that meant something. But today, for now, he was a white teenage boy with terrified eyes and a scarred face.

“Rory!”

He froze at the angry call, wondering if he was Rory. Instinct had always told him who he was, what he was supposed to be doing…

He felt nothing but fear right now.

“Rory, the fuck are you doing?!” A small violent-looking woman showed behind him in the mirror, looking right at him. “We’re leaving, you little shit.” A jacket smacked him forcefully in the back and he cringed away from it for a second before snatching it desperately from the air for fear of what she’d do if he let it fall. “You git your ass out to the truck in five minutes or I swear, I’ll beat you blue.”

She strode to the couch and grabbed the remote to shut the television off. “Stop watching that God damned news. Who gives a shit what happens to those damn Arabs. Brought it on themselves.” The woman—his mother?—smacked him in the back of the head as she passed him. "That Max guy should get a God damned medal."

He had a vague feeling that any other time, he would have stopped her, called her on the abuse, done _something_. It was what he did—he remembered that much.

Any other time, he would have had some clue of what to do. But there was no one, no thing, no instinct to lead him.

He wasn't sure he had it in him to do it alone.

"Rory Michaels, get your ass out that door or I will take a piece out of it—see if I won't!"

He wasn't sure he had a choice.

**************

**Mexico City, August 2003**

Jake walked around one of the large, open-air markets in downtown Mexico City, ignoring most of the wares. He’d been on his own since Pooch had split from him an hour ago to look for something to send to Jolene for the baby.

Jensen smiled at that. They’d managed to do something right, even though they'd died and everything went to shit. After LA, after what happened to Pooch (and to them all), they decided unanimously to take a few chances.

Though Cougar had no one besides the Losers, Clay got to visit his mom—too far gone from Alzheimer’s to process that he should have been dead, but not so far gone that she wasn’t overjoyed to see her Frankie. And while Pooch couldn’t go home again, he did get to see little Jerome born. They’d had to bug out two days later when the hospital started asking why the dad was listed as deceased on Jolene’s admit papers, but at least he’d gotten to see them.

Seeing Jake’s sister and his niece Beth was a little easier—well, at least until he’d tried to beat up the ref at the soccer game. But seriously, was it so hard!? That woman—and he used the term loosely—had no idea what sportsmanlike conduct was.

They’d high-tailed it out pretty quickly after that. He wasn’t sure Jenny had forgiven him yet, four months later. Not that he had had a lot of time to think about it before now.

Up until a week ago, the five of them had spent every waking hour figuring out how to shut Max down. Aisha had pulled out all the stops with every contact she had, often flying off without them for a week or so at a time and coming back with another lead. Jensen had cracked computers he didn’t know he could crack in countries where he’d be hanged if they knew (that might include the States, now he thought about it, but the CIA central computer had been a hell of a lot easier than the Iran High Council’s system, so he was in and out in short order—and he was dead anyway, so who were they going to hang, right?). Cougar had had an awful lot of target practice, taking out drug lord after arms dealer after spy. And Pooch and Clay had blown up… a ton of shit. All over the world, it felt like, though Max seemed to stick mostly to the Americas with his dealers.

All in an effort to bring Max out of hiding. Chip away at his operation until the chunks were big enough to piss him off or set him running. Or both.

Jake didn’t know if it was working, but he’d made sure to keep his mind on business—mostly so it wouldn’t spend too much time dwelling on THERE. Because THERE was a truly fucked up place, and it was occupying more and more of his thoughts as time went on.

The dreams never stopped, the crawling sensation whenever Aisha got a certain bloodthirsty look on her face never abated… Jake spent half of his time trying to figure out what was real and what was not, and he was damn sick of it. At least he’d managed to convince himself of the big things. Like the fact that Clay was alive, not blown to hell by a firebomb somewhere in the Arabian sea. That little tidbit had come just a couple of months ago, along with the idea that Cougar had died not long after. Except that they were both alive. HERE.

Most of the time he knew that stuff. But sometimes—like now, when Clay and Cougar were in Tehuacán, hunting down another of Max’s drug buddies and Aisha was nowhere to be found and he had too damn much time on his hands and not enough on his mind— _sometimes_ , he had a harder time keeping it all straight.

And unfortunately, the guys were beginning to notice. There’d been too much close-quarters living, too many times he’d woken in a panic, too many times when things he knew THERE colored things he’d done HERE.

   

Two months ago in Venezuela, he’d launched himself out of a sound sleep calling Clay’s name, thanks to that firebomb revelation. They’d all had separate rooms that time, so it should have been fine, except for the fact that he was still mildly drunk from the night before and had brilliantly woken Cougar to go find Clay “right the fuck now so I know he’s not dead.” They’d found him, all right—and neither he nor Aisha had been thrilled.

Everyone had been fully clothed at the time, and Jake had tried to pass it off as a drunken escapade, but it had earned him a sit down with the boss the next night.

“I get it, Kid,” Clay had said, sitting beside him at the bar, where Jake was nursing his coke-without-rum. “Swinging in the wind here, chasing Max all this time... We deal with it in different ways." He snorted and sipped his scotch wryly. "Not always great ways." He put the drink down and looked at Jake seriously. "But last night—more than last night... We're worried about you.”

Which was very _After School Special_ meets _Intervention_ , and completely useless.

“Unfortunately, Dr. Phil’s not around to ‘talk it out’ to, sir,” he said as he downed half his soda. Not that any psychotherapist would understand what the hell was going on in his brain. “It was a bad drunk, Clay,” he said flatly. “We’ve all had them. Why am I suddenly the poster child for crazy?” He didn’t say PTSD. After Bolivia, they’d all silently agreed that they weren’t saying that. They just weren't.

“Suddenly?” Clay shot back, trying to sound amused and light and normal. He sobered instantly. “Cougar hides everything under that damn hat of his,” he said quietly. “And Pooch? He’s still got Jolene, long distance shitstorm though it is. But you…”

“What, you think I don’t know how to handle myself?” Jake asked, fighting off the THERE where he’d said the exact same words. _A raft in the middle of the sea and a team who’d spent the last twelve hours thinking he was dead… He’d been the hero then, damn it, not the liability._

He tried not to react physically, simply raising his glass and shrugging. “Okay, fair enough.” He let THERE pass him by and turned to look Clay in the eye. “Sir, this is shit, but it’s _our_ shit. Tell you what: I promise not to go completely crazy on you before we roast Max on a spit, okay?” He let loose a brilliant smile he almost felt. “After that, all bets are off.”

Clay had stared at him long and hard, clearly gauging how much sanity was there. They were all coming apart at the seams in one way or another, right? Clay just had to decide whether Jake’s seams were so far gone it was time to toss him out.

“And if you try to bench me? CO or not, sir, I will come after you.” He scratched the back of his head thoughtfully. “But not before I take down Max.”

Clay had smiled tightly at that, something in the way Jake had delivered his lines putting the man at ease. “Don’t repeat that show you put on last night, Kid, okay?” he said finally. “I’m serious.”

“I don’t plan to,” he replied with a mock shudder. “That, I did not need to see.”

It was exactly how he would have responded before HERE and THERE got so close together, and Clay slapped him on the back and stood up to leave. “I take back everything I said about you, Kid,” he said with a smile, though Jake knew he was lying. “I think you’re as sane as any of us.”

Jake had looked back down at his drink as words from THERE bubbled back into his brain. “Colonel Franklin Clay, you are not the first man to make that mistake.”

    

He shook himself and continued walking down the lanes of wagons and carts full of clothes and fruits and foods. Thursday would be a year. Thursday, a year ago, he and Cougar and Clay and Pooch and Roque (the fucker) and 2 army flyers and 25 innocent kids died.

Or it might have been back in ‘98. Like he said, days like this, he was never really sure.

Getting himself back on track with difficulty, Jake focused on what he did know. And what he knew, both HERE and THERE, was that a lot of very messed up powerful people had too many fingers in Max’s disgusting little pies. Which made it less of a surprise than it could have been when Jake found a gun in his back as he looked over fake Louis Vuitton handbags that Jenny would never want to own anyway.

“Captain Jensen?” The voice behind him was gravelly and tired and seemed a lot more pissed off than it needed to be, considering _Jake_ was the one with the gun in his back. “Don’t turn around. Let’s take a walk.”

Jake didn’t bother looking for Pooch—luck was never on his side at times like this. And it was probably better if only one of them was caught, anyway, right?

“No hay ‘capitán’ aquí,” he answered in the thickest Mexican accent he could manage. “Mi nombre es Fernando.”

The man behind him snorted. “Well then shut the fuck up, Fernando, or that _marvelous_ hair of yours will have a new part.”

They quickly diverted from the craziness of the central market and headed down a far-too-deserted alley toward an abandoned building with a door barely on its hinges. Jake debated the wisdom of trying to take the man down right here.

“Don’t,” the gunman replied, sounding strangely familiar. Familiar in a way that things from THERE were familiar. _Shit._ “I have three men on your friend Porteous, and I guarantee they’ll take him out before I hit the ground.”

Funny, Jake really, really believed him. Why had they split up today? Normally he and Coug were joined at the hip—built-in backup. Would have made this easier. And quicker. “So, what’s going on?” he tried, blithe and unconcerned. “Whatever it is, I swear, the lovely senorita didn’t tell me that was illegal here.”

Again, that tired, amused snort from behind. Jake itched to turn around, but the pistol was shoving his kidney straight through to his stomach already. “Keep up the jokes, Captain,” the man grated. “I don’t care what you do on your off time. All I’m trying to do is stop you and your friends from getting yourselves killed before you do your job.”

CIA. Just popped into Jake’s head—from THERE. This guy was CIA. Well…. He supposed it was inevitable. At some point, the Agency was going to get too pissed off to ignore the damage.

“I’m not a captain anymore,” he growled, as the door yawned open in front of them and he was shoved inside ahead of the man. “I’m sure you assholes had a hand in that, didn’t you?”

Given room to move, he finally turned in the dim light cast by boarded up windows to face his abductor. The man was old, cragged, tired and angry and dangerous as spit. He was the same guy who’d tried to stop Clay going after Pooch when Roque died THERE.

“Stegler.” Regardless of his instant dislike of anyone who got in the way of Losers’ business (and anyone who shoved a gun in his back), Jake still had a niggly thought that he should probably kind of trust this guy. Or at least that he was no friend of Max.

Stegler shoved him against the wall in the semi-darkness, and Jake didn’t smirk at the lightning quick flash of fear he saw in the man’s eyes. “How the hell do you know who I am?”

Jake snorted exactly the same way Stegler had, not a drop of fear in his own face, he was sure. One benefit of going completely around the bend—he didn’t so much care about being careful anymore. “How’d you find a dead man in the middle of Mexico City?”

Stegler stepped back, that weariness taking over his visage as he ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Shit, you _are_ good, aren’t you?” He put the safety on his pistol and shoved it into the holster at the back of his pants. “Might actually be able to get this done, huh, kid?”

Jake bristled. Clay called him Kid. Only Clay. “Get what done?” As if he didn’t know.

“Taking down Max.”

*******  
to be continued

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note for QL and Losers movie readers: a number of THERE moments include quoted material from the stunningly awesome comic book series, The Losers, by Diggle and Jock. Buy it. It's awesome.


	4. Chapter 4

When Jake joined Pooch at their hotel’s bar two hours later, he didn’t say a word about his impromptu meetup with the CIA.

“Where’d you run off to?” Pooch asked as he leaned back and gestured to the mojito he’d already ordered for Jake. “Figured I’d find you still picking over those funkass dolls in the mercado.”

Jake glared as he sipped his drink. A bunch of American kids came in, snapping pictures all over the place, and Pooch and Jake both hunkered down out of habit. “They’re called _Funko_ , you heathen, and I don't think a man who'll only drive if his bobblehead chihuahua is on deck should throw stones, you know?”

“Whatever, man.” Pooch said. He coughed “geek” into his hand like a ten-year-old and finished off his own beverage.

“Have you heard from Clay yet?” Jake was trying hard not to worry. He was. But THERE was loud today, and, well… yeah. He worried. And of course, Pooch noticed, which meant he’d probably be watching Jake like a sad-eyed, worried hawk for a while.

Jake could really do without all these people thinking they were his older brothers. Especially when they all seemed to understand that he was going slowly insane and kept trying to be _supportive_ and _understanding_ about it.

“Nah,” Pooch replied, sounding like he was trying to placate a nervous five-year-old. “Don’t figure we will for a couple of days at least. Max’s people have surveillance on top of their surveillance in all these places. EMCON until completion, right?”

Jake nodded. Emissions Control—no texts, no radio, no computer use. Nothing, until the job was done. “Fucking irritating, man.”

Pooch snorted. “No doubt, buddy. Still, you know those two’ll get the job done.” He caught the waitress’s eye and motioned for two more, though Jake had barely started his own drink. “Got nothing to lose now, so we may as well play to win, right?”

Jake forced himself not to choke.

> _Antigua didn’t suck, as far as places to be dead went. It could have been worse. They could have been the rest of the Losers, who were dead in a whole different way. It had been a year now, and sometimes Jake still felt like every nerve was being rubbed raw, like every breath was a struggle. Increasingly, he sort of wondered why he bothered to take the next one._
> 
> _But like a good little survivor, he raised his bottle and clinked it with Pooch’s in the fading sunset, offering a toast to the toast. “Cougar and Clay,” he muttered softly._
> 
> _Pooch’s response was louder, stronger. Because Pooch was the real survivor. “Cougar and Clay. Played to win, nothing to lose.”_
> 
> _Jake swallowed down the beer and realized, pathetically, that he really only had the “nothing to lose” part of that saying left._

“Yo, Jensen, you okay?”

Pooch’s call shook Jake from THERE and he looked up to see his friend watching him carefully. Damn it. Jake cleared his throat. “I’m good.” He leaned back and tried to look like he was relaxing. “I hate this waiting around shit. Wish there was something _we_ could be doing, you know?”

A quiet female voice behind them had Jake’s blood racing in sudden fear. “You could take Max down for good.” Aisha moved out of the shadows to stand beside the table, smirking—at the way she’d made Jake jump, no doubt. “Unless you’re too busy hunting down that perfect desk toy.”

Pooch grinned and gestured warily for the she-devil to sit in the booth beside him. Pooch didn’t much trust Aisha either, but he didn’t share Jake’s sense of impending doom surrounding the woman. No one did—because she wasn't that much of a bitch HERE. Jake, on the other hand, kept waiting for her to lean over sexily and slit his throat.

He took hold of himself hard. Aisha could be scary as shit, no doubt, but this kind of whack response from his fucked-up psyche? Not okay. He’d been trusting her less and less and damned if he understood why. “Finally got something?” He tried to sound normal.

Big fail there, obviously. She gave him a weird look but turned quickly to Pooch and nodded. At least _she_ didn’t give a shit that he was losing his mind—though he supposed that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. She could just be waiting to exploit a known weakness. “Maybe. We’ll wait until Clay and Cougar get back.” She gave that shark’s smile, which did absolutely _nothing_ for Jake’s nerves, thank you very much. “A certain drug dealer in Tehuacán had a tragic accident this afternoon.” She paused until the waitress had plunked down a bottle of beer in front of her, along with the replacement mojitos, and left. “Seems his whole, beautiful hacienda went up in flames.” She took a sip of her drink. “With him in it.”

Pooch smirked. “Gutierrez was a CIA dealer, wasn’t he? Agency must be having a cow.”

Jake didn’t laugh hysterically, but it was a near thing. Stegler, at least, would probably be thrilled. “Yeah,” he agreed, ignoring the weird looks _both of them_ were giving him, now. “You’d think eventually they’d get pissed off enough to do something about us.”

Aisha stared hard for a long minute before she took a casual pull on her beer. “Be glad they have bigger fish to fry. I hear Max is a little less popular in Washington these days.”

“One of your sources tell you that?” Jake asked. He knew he sounded less blasé than he wanted to, but he couldn't help it. Something was wrong with this picture. She was… He didn’t know what she was, but it wasn’t helpful, that’s for damn sure.

Aisha leaned forward. "They seem to be getting farther than you do, lately," she countered.

“Look, if the work’s done, they should be calling with a contact site soon,” Pooch said, clearly trying to divert the both of them from whatever was going on (and no, Jake didn’t really _know_ what was going on, except that THERE was screaming “Danger, Will Robinson!” at the top of its frickin’ lungs). “Let’s pack up and get ready to go.”

*********

**Washington, DC**

Al Calavicci slid into his bed and turned off the light, stretching and giving himself his daily pep talk. He’d made it through today. He hadn’t given up and trashed his office, and he hadn’t had a single drink.

The first scenario was honestly more likely than the second, which kind of surprised him. He figured he should have hit the bottle weeks ago. It would have happened in the movies—the bitter cynical military man who was pulled up by his bootstraps loses the friend who saved him and hits the bottle again, ending up back in the gutter or something equally desperate.

Except that Sam wasn’t dead. He was out there, somewhen, and Al needed to stay sober to find him. He knew _exactly_ what it was like to be stuck in hell and know that no one thought you were alive to save. He wasn’t going to let Sam come back one day to find the whole world had written him off and moved on.

To ensure that didn’t happen, though, he needed resources, hence him congratulating himself for postponing that attractive first scenario for another day. God, he hated feeling so stuck. He was trying to make progress, but increasingly, he felt like he was spinning his wheels—he'd never felt the lack of Sam’s brilliance more acutely. _Hell,_ he thought with black humor, _if Sam was here, he’d be home by now._

The Navy had retired him in June—a year or three later than a rear admiral had the right to be. Project Quantum Leap had been a civilian/governmental assignment, so the Navy had gotten around the retirement limits by putting him on inactive, consultant status, but when the project was shut down, the upper echelon were probably happy to finally cut him loose.

Being a decorated officer and an ex-astronaut besides, Al had no dearth of offers for consultant jobs. Goliath Industries had even tried to recruit him, pretty much the minute his ink was dry, but who the hell would work for those thugs?

He’d instead chosen a small startup called Quad Corp, a think tank with lots of contacts, tons of bandwidth, and new age twentysomethings in charge. They used his knowledge and experience to test their prototypes and they didn’t care what Al did with their computers in his off time. He had an office, but he was free to ‘tinker’ in the labs because the kids running the place subscribed to the same play-to-discover school of computer development that Sam did.

Quad was in the process of creating the “next age of computers”: really just the latest version of Ziggy. Her laser matrices, new and unheard of in the mid-nineties, were becoming more possible in the new millennium, and these kids really seemed to have a handle on what needed to be done. Al was no slouch as an engineer, the skills he’d gained at NASA honed to a fine edge after after all these years with Sam. He knew he couldn't recreate Ziggy on his own, but with Quad's resources, he could sure as hell try to build something like her.

It had been nearly three months since Gooshie told him that yes, Sam had successfully input the code for the Hidey-Hole Protocol, but no, he didn’t think it had been set to activate. The morons in the Air Force and their “friends” in the NSA had pulled the plug on Ziggy, literally, and there hadn’t been a damn thing Al could do about it. Without her, he lost his link to Sam, but maybe he could create something else that could help. He’d been working on a temporal-neural interface since he joined the company, but without Sam’s knowledge and the guidance of the one computer he was missing, he knew he was years from completing it.

His phone beeped and he sighed. The problem with working with twenty-five-year-old bosses was that they had no sense of time. Calling and texting at all hours. He rolled over and looked at the tiny screen on the bedside table.

`birthday 1`  
`birthday 2`  
`birthday 3`  
`81.331.69.45`

Al stared at the cellular phone dumbly for a minute, running a nervous hand over his mouth. It couldn’t be… The phone beeped again, insistent.

`birthday 1`  
`birthday 2`  
`birthday 3`  
`81.331.69.45`

“Ha, ha!” Al shot up out of bed and lunged for his desk, turning on his computer with a shaking hand.

> _“It’d have to be something simple that only we would think of,” Sam said, mind clearly going a million miles an hour as the two of them sat in the meeting room in the middle of the night and munched on their pizza. “Something to authenticate that everyone was who he said he was.”  
>  _
> 
> _Al had smiled at his young friend’s sense of intrigue. “Come on, Sam!” he’d replied, trying to be the voice of reason. “It’s 1992, for God’s sake. I agree, the computer is going to be spectacular, and we need to have security in effect, but how’s the thing supposed to escape if someone shuts it down? It’s a computer.”_
> 
> _“It’s an intelligence,” Sam countered. “It’s… It’s going to think for itself, Al. If we give it a back door, it’ll know when to take it.”_
> 
> _“You’re getting ahead of yourself, kid,” Al had told him. “Computers don’t think for themselves.”_

In his almost empty, silent DC apartment, Al Calavicci typed in the address given at the bottom of the text and waited for a computer that _did_.

The screen came up and simple text boxes asked for the three birthdays. Al had thought Sam had read too many spy novels when he’d talked about this, but he dutifully typed in his sister’s birthday, Sam’s brother’s birthday, and Ziggy’s “birthday”—the day Sam put the first laser relay in place.

A wash of color took over his screen, blessedly familiar. The words that appeared were equally welcome.

`Good evening, Admiral.`

“Good to see you, Ziggy,” Al murmured thankfully, as he typed the same. “Where are you?”

`Near Geneva`, Ziggy replied. `I believe Dr. Beckett would like it here.`

“Hiding out at CERN, huh?” Al chuckled, feeling better than he’d felt… Hell, since Sam leaped that first time. Maybe he and Ziggy had a chance to do this together. “What took you so long? How did you get out—I thought the code wasn’t active.” He spoke as he typed. It felt weird not to talk to her, so he talked to her.

`The protocol was useful. I activated it myself some time ago. But it called for a fragmenting of my code. Dr. Beckett is prone to romanticism and his ideas on espionage are inefficient. It took me some time to piece myself back together.`

“I’ll bet,” Al muttered to himself, thinking of the petabytes of data that made up even Ziggy’s _basic_ matrix. He was both impressed and a little disturbed that she’d obviously reviewed her own base code and shown the initiative to activate a module that had been dormant. She really _could_ think for herself. “What’s the plan?” She had to have a plan. She wouldn’t have finally contacted him if she didn’t.

`Find a dead man.`

A MySpace page appeared on the screen, the post from earlier today. _MADE IT TO MEXICO CITY, BABY!_ the tagline read, below a blurry photograph canted to the side, showing a drunken African American teenager. Al snorted… and then he looked closer. There in the background, by chance almost perfectly in focus, was a blond man with round glasses and a growth of hair on his chin. He looked irritated, and leaner, older, and more exhausted than he had when Al had seen him last, years before he was implicated in the deaths of 25 Bolivian children.

Captain Jacob Jensen was obviously a whole lot more alive than reports might suggest.

*********

**Oaxaca, Mexico**

Jake threw his bag on one of the two beds in the beautiful large room he and Pooch would be sharing with Cougar, once he and Clay got into town. Aisha had gotten her and Clay a room across the hall.

“Thank God for that,” Pooch said quietly once she’d disappeared to stow her own gear. “I pity whoever has the room next to their headboard.”

It was a better hotel than any they’d stayed at lately, and Jake should have been able to enjoy it. He just couldn’t calm down, though, and after five years of THERE and HERE, he knew enough to know there had to be a reason.

“What the hell’s eating you, J?” Pooch asked, dropping onto the other bed and bouncing a few times. “You’re gonna crawl out of your skin soon.” Jake really did appreciate that the team, most of the time, was able to ignore his growing crazy. He wished Pooch would do it now.

He contemplated telling him about Stegler, but Jake wanted to wait until they were all together. He couldn’t explain why he thought they should trust the guy, and it was better that he only prove himself unable to explain it once.

“You boys up for a drink?” Aisha asked, lounging in the doorway suddenly, looking like a cat ready to play with her food.

And he was not explaining it, he instinctively determined, with Aisha in attendance, no matter how crazy it sounded to the rest of them. He buried the fear that, eventually, they weren’t going to trust him at all. Eventually they’d have to see he was completely nuts, right? Insisting that Aisha be kept in the dark because he'd dreamed she was evil was only going to hasten that.

So Jake slapped on a grin and threw it at each of them in turn, getting a shrug from Aisha and an angry scowl from Pooch. “Sure,” he agreed brightly. “Let’s go.”

Pooch smacked shoulders with him as they left. “We’re talking later, J,” he promised darkly.

“Yes we are,” Jake said, too brightly, settling himself with a deep breath. “Yes we are.”

Cougar had a long sloppy swath of blood-dotted bandage down one arm when he and a slightly battered Clay walked into the hotel bar three hours later, causing Jake’s heart to smack annoyingly against his chest wall. Damn, he had to get this under control. If he started to panic every time somebody got hurt around here, he’d have a heart attack in a week. But he couldn’t shake the idea that they were all hurtling toward something huge. And deadly.

“So, not entirely unscathed, then,” he greeted Cougar, grinning. Must not have been the most convincing grin he’d ever given, because Cougar’s eyes immediately narrowed. Like the best of best friends, though, he said nothing, and Jake turned to Clay instead. “You might want to brush up on your first aid.” He gestured to the bandage. “I'm just saying.”

“I’m not supposed to have to,” Clay said gruffly. He was clearly stiff and in some pain himself as he took a seat at the table Pooch, Jake, and Aisha had staked out when they walked in. The place was filling up, but their seats were conveniently near the back exit and blocked from general view by a couple of ornamental trees. “Wouldn’t need to at all if Cougar had been faster on his feet.”

Coug smiled a quiet smile. “Or wasn’t picking you up off the ground and running with you,” he put in quietly. Pooch raised an eyebrow. and Cougar elaborated. “Too much C-4.”

Jake chuckled, trying to make it sound real. “No such thing, man,” he disagreed, raising his drink in toast to Clay, who grinned tightly in response.

The grin dropped and Clay leaned forward. “Gutierrez had some things to say before his unfortunate accident,” he said quietly. “Apparently we’re doing something right. The Agency and the Russian government are both about ready to give up on protecting Max. He’s running scared.”

“Yeah, that's what Aisha said, too,” Pooch agreed, satisfied. Jake was just tense. And worried. And possibly insane, as his mind chattered at him about how nothing with Max was as it seemed and THERE, he’d been much more dangerous than they’d ever thought he was, and…

He shook himself and clued back in to what Clay was saying. “Gutierrez told me something else. Max has relocated—”

“To the Amazon,” Aisha completed for him, causing everyone to stare at her. She feigned surprise. “I told you I had information.”

“Tumucumaque National Park,” Clay agreed. “I don’t have coordinates.” He looked leadingly at Aisha, who shrugged her own ignorance.

“My contact couldn’t come up with anything more specific. He’s sure Max is headed there, but that’s as far as he’s gotten. He’s digging to get me a list of drug compounds and labs in and around the park.”

"They'd be good places to work on those plans for world domination—still not sure how many of those implosion bombs he had made, but he’s probably looking to make more. We just need to find out which hole he’s slunk into." Clay turned his gaze on Jake, who sighed.

“Oh sure,” he griped, though his mind was going a thousand miles a minute as he tried to figure out the best satellites to hack. “Things get tough, call in the geek.”

Pooch shrugged. “No point in making things easy on ourselves.” He put down his beer bottle and got serious. “That forest is huge, guys. Like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

 _Unless I can get hold of a government-powered magnet,_ Jake thought to himself, running through the phone number he’d committed to memory in a derelict building in Mexico City. “I guess I’d better get to work then,” he said, “and leave the drunken revels to the rest of you.”

Clay gave him a suspicious look, but Jake was lucky—the boss was too exhausted to engage in more teen counseling sessions.

“Tonight’s for recovery,” Clay declared with a tired smile. “Blowing up drug labs takes a lot out of you.” He sobered quickly. “No partying from any of you, though,” he warned, staring hard at Jake. _Man, you have one drunken crazy in Venezuela and you’re marked for life._ “Until we find Max, we’re all on duty. Got it?”

Jake tipped a half-assed salute to him. “Aye-aye, Captain,” he exclaimed, glad when it earned him a weary grin. “I’m going to go get to work anyway, Boss. Not much in the mood for a party.” He smirked. “Unless it’s Max’s Going to Hell party, of course.”

Cougar and Pooch both gave him looks that said they knew he was up to something, but Clay nodded him off.

Jake waved carelessly and headed straight for the stairway—then slipped through the gift store and out into the dark of the evening before he got there. He walked and dialed and sweated in the summer heat, waiting for an answer.

“What?” a gravelly voice snapped. Stegler was an ass, HERE or THERE.

“What do you know about operations in and around Tumucumaque National Park?” Jake asked, rapid-fire. Pooch had already been pissed and waiting for answers, and Cougar knew something was up. It wouldn’t be long before they were heading to the room and he didn’t want them questioning his absence. Keeping track of his crazy ass seemed to be a full-time job for those two.

“Where?” Stegler asked gruffly.

“Brazil, Stegler,” Jake bit back. “Brazil. Might still have been labeled 'Here be dragons' when you were in school."

“Watch your mouth, Kid,” Stegler warned. “Think Max is headed there?”

“We have our sources,” Jake replied diffidently.

“If one of your sources is a pert little killer with a drug-dealer daddy, I’d watch my ass.”

“Because she’s been so much less reliable than you assholes up to now,” Jake barked back. He ignored the instincts that screamed how very, very right Stegler really was. “You said you wanted to help bring him down, so help. Or walk," he offered, trying to channel his inner Clay.

“For a dead man you shoot your mouth off too damn much,” Stegler grumbled. “I’ll try to get you something.” He hung up and Jake stared at his blank phone.

He stowed it in his pocket and headed upstairs quickly. “Yeah, I’ll just hold my breath, Agency Man.”

**********

Ziggy’s migration into the internet had done wonders for her information gathering abilities. She had never been programmed _not_ to hack into other people's systems, so she set about trying to track down Captain Jensen any way she could. Even with her skills, though, there were some holes she couldn’t fill. Large portions of the world still lacked security cameras and electronic check-in and credit card readers. Which was clearly how the Losers had stayed alive for the last year.

As a result, Jake Jensen was in the wind. And with him, if Ziggy was right, went a very real chance to get Sam back for good. Al had had a long talk with her last night. Well, a long keyboard chat with her. He missed her voice, which should have sounded pathetic to him, but really didn’t.

`There is evidence of manipulation in a number of periods within Dr. Beckett’s lifetime, but the number is not in keeping with what we have come to expect in terms of his usual frequency of leaping.`

Al nodded. Time was linear on their side of things, but for Sam, time was a ball of string a kitten had chewed on for a week—they had no idea if he even felt transit time, or whether he just leaped from one place to another without a sense of passage. The fact remained, though, that he should have leapt at least twenty or thirty times in the almost six months he’d been missing, but the graph Ziggy had up on Al’s screen showed fewer than a dozen disturbances.

“You think he slowed down when he started leaping on his own?” _If_ he’d actually started leaping on his own. It was the one hypothesis that meant he was still alive, so it was the one Al clung to.

Ziggy didn’t answer him, exactly. `If you recall, we theorized that large influxes of power could disrupt or even destroy the leaping process.`

“If you’re telling me Sam’s dead thanks to a volcano or something, Ziggy, I don’t want to hear it,” he grated as he typed. He wasn't dealing with that possibility. Was not.

`It is more likely that something occurred that disrupted the timeline severely enough that we are unable to access Dr. Beckett.`

Al calmed down and thought. “Unable to see the ripples?” It was possible, he supposed. Sam wasn’t connected to the Project now, so maybe that was making him harder for Ziggy to track. “What are we talking here, though? We’ve done lightning before. It can’t be something that easy…”

`In July of 2001, a nuclear explosion occurred in the town of Pripyat, Ukraine.`

“Yeah, I remember,” Al replied, typing as he spoke. “But it didn’t happen.” He paused, fingers hovering over the keyboard as he thought. _Son of a..._ “Are you saying it did for Sam?”

`I am saying that not only did Captain Jensen not die in a training accident in 1998, but the nuclear explosion in 2001 only ceased to occur after Dr. Beckett’s leap into the captain.` That should have been a non sequitur, but it wasn't.

“Wait a minute.” Al sat back, trying to wrap his head around an aspect of Sam’s post-Project leaping that he’d never had a chance to consider. “So if Sam was near the blast when he leaped out...”

`It is possible a micro-offshoot of Dr. Beckett's timeline was created by a leap in near proximity to the nuclear detonation.`

> "So we're talking alternate realities here?" Al had asked, back at the very beginning. It had taken him some time to really understand Sam's theories of what would happen if you actually changed the timeline while traveling.
> 
> "No," Sam said with a smile. "No, no 'Infinite Earths.' If you could even affect something, the reality that would have happened without the interference just... doesn't." He'd cocked his head speculatively. "Well, I guess if something happened right as you were sent in—or retrieved—something big..."
> 
> "Sammy?" Al had called irritably, trying to rope in the genius. "You gotta use words _outside_ your head, kid."
> 
> Sam had shaken that head in apology. "If your string... snagged? If you got caught in part it? You could conceivably get stuck there, any changes you might make affecting only you and this... offshoot. Like a bubble of alternate reality."
> 
> Al hadn't considered it very closely back then. Hell, all of this was theoretical anyway. "Sounds like a hell of a way to live."
> 
> “Well, it wouldn’t be a real reality. It would only exist for the years the snag was long.”
> 
> The idea took Al a minute to make sense of. “You mean it would… what, copy a few years of our reality and then the cloned portion would function on its own? Like a test server or something?” He let the idea sit for a minute. “What would happen when you got to the end of it?”
> 
> Sam’s eyes darted back and forth as he thought, calculating possibilities. "You’d just keep circling around the snag, I think. An endless loop." He sat back with a bemused grin for the discovering. “Eventually it would kill you.”
> 
> _That_ had gotten Al's attention. "Excuse me?"
> 
> "The temporal forces involved in that kind of repeated looping would eventually tear you apart."
> 
> Al had looked him in the eye. "And you're _sure_ something like this is _really_ a good idea?"

_Damn it, Sam._ “But what does Jensen have to do with it?” he wondered aloud. He put his fingers back on the keyboard. “Are you saying Jensen had something to do with the explosion in Pripyat? If Sam hit a snag there, it's possible that Jensen knows when and how, exactly, that happened?” He shook his head. “Jensen wouldn’t remember any of it, though.”

`It is possible that one of Dr. Beckett’s post-Project leaps affected the Pripyat outcome simultaneous to his Project leap into Captain Jensen, but the probability is that the two are related.`

“Great, so what are we supposed to do about it?” He wanted to know. “We can’t make the kid remember something that technically never happened.” He sighed. “Even if he _was_ part of the original event.”

`Captain Jensen’s brain make-up is remarkably similar to yours, Admiral.`

Al nodded. “Well sure, but I remember the original timelines because of Sam, Ziggy.” He froze as another thought occurred to him. “But if Sam’s leap in '98 linked Jensen to him…”

`Then Captain Jensen's connection to Dr. Beckett does not come from Quantum Leap’s neural connections.`

Al finished the thought out loud as Ziggy’s next words appeared on the screen. “It comes straight from Sam.” He smiled sadly, a wave of jealousy unaccountably washing over him. “What if Jensen’s still connected to him?”

*********  
to be continued….


	5. Chapter 5

Jake got back to the hotel room and flipped open his laptop, connecting to the hotel’s wifi right before Pooch and Cougar walked in and sat quietly on their respective beds. Well, Cougar sat on Jake’s bed, but they all knew Jake wouldn’t be using it tonight anyway, because the internet and various spy satellites called. The bandage on Cougar's arm was stained with blood—old and new.

"You should get Pooch to sew that up," Jake said, trying not to sound too worried. That'd be weird, right? He just had a feeling he should be looking out for Cougar more than he had been.

Pooch was actually reaching for his pack at that moment, which made the conversational gambit moot.

“Where’s Clay?” Jake asked instead, still stalling.

“Where do you think?” Cougar returned sharply. Nipped that stalling thing right in the bud, and Jake frowned as Pooch cut away the bandages to show a jagged slice that went from Cougar's shoulder to just below his elbow. “He was serious about having to wind down from that one, so he is.” Coug squinted in pain as Pooch gave him a couple of shots of local anesthetic along the length of the wound—thank God for medical supply companies that didn't ask for silly shit like medical licenses. Made their lives a lot easier.

“Want to tell me what’s going on _now,_ J?” Pooch didn’t really ask, as he cleaned Cougar up. “Cause I think I’ve been pretty patient. Something more than usual’s been up with you since before we left Mexico City.”

Jake stared blankly at his computer for a long minute. _Something more than usual. Thanks for the vote of confidence, buddy._ There wasn’t any question that he was going to spill the beans. He had to.

Clay should be here, but Clay was with Aisha. As usual. He was getting increasingly blind about her. He’d done it before, when there was nothing at stake but his own neck—been so wrapped up in a lady that he didn’t see the danger. Or just didn’t care…

Pooch was sewing up Cougar's arm, but they both managed to watch him as well. He took a deep breath. Fuck it. No time like the present...

“I had a little sit down with a new buddy from the CIA,” he said, startled when Cougar and Pooch both tried to jump to their feet mid-suture. “WHOA, guys, chill!” he said, waving them back down and giving them a minute to calm themselves. “He only wanted to talk.” He shrugged. “Well, and jab a gun in my back, but…”

“How did they find us?” Cougar hissed at the pain he'd caused himself with the abrupt movement and glared at the fresh blood oozing from the wound. “We need Clay and Aisha in here—”

“No.” Jake shook his head. “If we can get Clay alone, perfect, but not Aisha.” He read their skeptical faces and was suddenly glad he’d never told any of them about THERE. You know, because they thought he was crazy _now_...? “I just… Trust me, guys, okay?”

He was only mildly hurt at the wary nods he got. You couldn’t hold it against people if they thought you might be crazy when you were sitting there thinking the same damn thing, now could you?

He told them about the meeting he’d had, though he left out the whole threatening Pooch’s life part. Stegler wanted Max gone, but his hands had been tied by his superiors, who were all either on Max’s payroll or terrified of being on his shit list. Why Stegler was different, Jake chose not to question. He had an idea that he'd known the answer THERE, and that was going to have to be good enough.

Stegler had realized someone was working behind the scenes to pick apart Max’s operation, but he hadn’t put together the fact that it might be the Losers themselves until he saw a request from Springfield, Mass PD, inquiring about the status of the father of Jolene Porteous’s son. Then he'd started digging into dead guys with a serious grudge and the right set of skills who were not so much dead, really.

“That’s what I get for trying to see my kid,” Pooch griped. He kept his eyes on his needlework, face drawn down in worry. “How do we know he’s not playing you? Who’s to say he ain’t just waiting to hand us over to Max?” He exchanged a look with Cougar. “I mean, come on, Jensen. We’ve never trusted the Agency before.” “I don’t trust it now,” Jake said quietly, refusing again to try to explain what he couldn’t explain. “I… trust him—I mean, enough to milk him for information.” He grinned a little sickly. “Why not use them the way they were trying to use us?”

“And probably still are,” Cougar put in realistically.

Pooch nodded in agreement and pegged Jake with a serious stare. “Which brings us back to Aisha.”

Jake shrugged. “They'd probably want her more than they'd want us—hell, Max might too. She works for herself, guys. And there’s the whole thing with Daddy Dearest, and her and Clay, and…” He took another deep breath. “Look, I know it’s a lot, asking you to trust me with how I’ve been acting the past few months, but...”

“J, it ain’t that—” Pooch protested, though it was kind of clear from the doubt in his eyes that it was exactly that.

“What do we do?” Cougar broke in, showing that for now, he, at least, was ready to back Jake in whatever play he was planning to make. And wasn’t it heartwarming that he was just going to go with doing what the crazy man said?

Jake bent over his laptop. “We find Max. I find Max, and Stegler finds Max, and Aisha finds Max, and we see which one of us is right.”

Pooch snorted, tying off the last of Cougar's stitches. “Sounds like a recipe for disaster.”

Jake smiled fatalistically. “My favorite flavor.”

*********

`Admiral, I believe I have uncovered something disturbing about Captain Jensen’s supposed death in Bolivia.`

“Beyond the fact that 25 innocent kids died?” Al grunted but didn’t type. He finished making the careful solder line on the circuit board before him, blowing the connection cool and cursing the fact that his hands weren’t as steady as they used to be.

`It appears the air-to-air strike may have been ordered by the United States military.`

Al froze in the act of attaching another relay. “Damn.” He finished the connection and put down the soldering iron so he could turn to his keyboard. “Do you have proof?” Leverage was good to have. According to the information Ziggy had been amassing about Jensen’s team, Jensen, Clay, and Porteous all had ties: a sister, a mom, a wife and kid. People who missed them now. The Losers would probably do a lot to get back to them.

 _If_ the government wanted them to get back. Or could be convinced it was _expedient_ to want them to get back. Leverage worked both ways, after all.

`If I can continue to track the military overseer in charge of their mission, I believe I can acquire some documentation.`

Al nodded, looking at the computer guts beside him. With Ziggy helping, he was nearly where he wanted to be.

He glared at the device. _Yeah, right._ Even if he got this to work, he had to find Jensen, who was still stubbornly off-grid, and convince the kid to trust him. And of course, Jensen had to have the answer to Pripyat in his head. And it had to involve Sam—in reality, not in theory. Then there was getting back to Project Quantum Leap and breaking in and powering up and finding out whether they could even access the micro-offshoot and finding Sam _in it_...

He finished the last connection and sat back as his mind raced. He forced himself to take a deep breath. _One thing at a time, Al,_ he coached himself. _One thing at a time._

“Are you ready to test this thing?” he asked finally as he snapped the device’s case closed. He crossed his fingers, hoping soon, he’d be talking to Ziggy for real, instead of just dictating as he typed and imagining her voice.

`Initiating primary link...`

The device’s screen blinked on and off a few times and Al waited, studying the look of it. Gone was Sam’s fanciful chock-o-block design. This handlink was sleek and black and looked more like a PDA than anything else. Sam had been all about dreaming, and Al…? Well, he dreamed, too, but he knew when to keep a low profile. He slipped an earbud into his ear and plugged the other end of the cord into the handlink.

“Hello, Admiral.”

Al smiled as Ziggy’s rich, sexy voice came to him loud and clear. “Missed hearing your voice, Ziggy,” he admitted. “A lot.”

“I have missed you as well, Admiral,” she replied warmly. She paused, as if taking a look around. “This device is sufficient for the purpose.”

He chuckled at the back-handed compliment. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Zig.” He looked back at his computer, watching as Ziggy used the wireless and the handlink to manipulate the information on his screen. “Now we just have to find a bunch of Losers in a haystack.”

“The military overseer in Bolivia was codenamed Max,” Ziggy supplied. “The codename appears to have been in use since the second World War, and I am having difficulty ascertaining the current user’s identity.”

“Keep hunting, Ziggy,” he told her, starting his own search of what satellites and intelligence files he could still get access to. “I have a feeling if we find Max, we’ll find Jensen.”

And then, God willing, they'd find Sam.

********

Sam Beckett had never been afraid of the void before, not even after he left home and began leaping on his own. In the void between lives he'd known who he was. He'd known what he was doing and why.

For a long time, after he'd made his choice to keep leaping, to cut himself off from Al and the Project, he'd thought about home. About Donna and Al and Tom and everyone he'd left behind.

Sometimes it was a relief to feel the tug of another leap, the almost violent dump of information that became instinct as his own being was subsumed by the leapee's personality. For the duration of a leap, he couldn’t remember to miss them because he wasn't him.

Eventually he had let them go, and the peace that choice brought to him made the void more welcoming. He didn't miss them, but he knew what it was like to be home, as if it were a half-remembered, well-loved story.

That was all different now, after the flash of white light that had knocked him sideways, mid-travels. Now the void was cold and blank. He had held to his memories at first, grabbing them with a fierceness akin to terror. But with every leap—and successful or not, he always leaped—he lost a little more of himself.

And now, when he was someone else, he knew he wasn’t. That was the real horror of it: he knew he should be someone—someone who could help, someone who could change things for the better—but he didn’t know who that was anymore. He wondered increasingly whether he had ever known. His existence was rapidly dwindling to moments of terror because he didn’t know what he should do, interspersed with moments of terror because he didn’t know who he should be.

He thought maybe, right at first, he'd known what happened and why he was here. Something about time whirling around itself. Something he'd thought of before he'd ever leaped. Something he'd talked to... someone... about.

Now he just thought this must be Hell. And he wondered what he'd done to deserve it.

********

Jake was still searching satellite footage three days later, and he and everyone else were getting antsy.

The only bright spot had come yesterday, when Stegler had emailed him a possible grid—the closest thing to finding Max that the guy could get, apparently. It narrowed Jake’s search area to a few hundred kilometers, but there were still hundreds of thousands of recon photos and satellite images to go over.

“Feels like it shouldn't be this hard to find one guy,” Pooch said as he walked into the hotel room. It was possibly the millionth time he’d said that since they’d started this. He tossed a plastic box filled with a couple of burritos from the local taqueria at Jake, who ignored it entirely and kept staring at his computer screen. Jake had lost track of where the others had gotten to, which was probably not good policy in the current atmosphere.

Cougar had been bothered by the idea of keeping Clay in the dark about Stegler, and to be honest, so had Jake. After the contact last night, they all decided that _if_ they could catch Clay without Aisha, whichever one of them was there would let him in on what was going on.

The door opened loudly and Jake looked up to see Clay glaring at him and Cougar, vaguely chagrined, coming in behind. Apparently now was the time.

“You were going to tell me this when, Jensen?” Clay asked, standing over Jake’s computer and glowering.

Jake pushed back in his chair so he could crane his neck up to meet his CO’s angry gaze. “Pretty much now, sir,” he replied. He went on before Clay could rip him a new one. “Look, if we’re going to find Max, we need all the help we can get—”

“He’s agency! Damn it, Jensen—”

“Hey, back off!” Jake snapped. He’d been battered by worry and THERE and this fucking feeling of impending doom for too damn long, and Clay badgering him was the last straw. “Aisha’s working off the blood money of a guy _you_ killed, _and_ she’s batshit crazy, but you still trust _her_.”

Surprisingly, he was neither shot nor knocked flat on his ass for that comment. Clay stared at him for a long moment, and Jake could almost see the wheels turning. Because Jake was never this confrontational—not with Clay. Posthumous Dishonorable Discharge or no, Clay was his commanding officer and Jake had always acted like it. But this wasn’t the time for stroking Clay’s ego. This was serious.

“You think he’s giving you reliable intell?” Clay finally asked, voice quiet, like it always was when he was strategizing.

Jake snorted tiredly. “What he’s given me up to now has pretty much just narrowed down where I’m looking,” he replied. “But yeah. He seems to want Max in a pine box as much as we do.”

“Pretty sure that’s not possible,” Pooch grumbled.

Clay ran a hand over his head. “Aisha—”

“Is Aisha, boss,” Pooch said quietly. “We’ve never really trusted her—not all the way.”

“She’s not a Loser, Colonel,” Cougar put in, making Jake smile a little bit. He might be going crazy and they might all know it, but at least these two were willing to back him on this one thing.

A very long, very uncomfortable moment of silence followed, before Clay blew out a breath. “Fuck it.” He pegged Jake with a worried glare. “You triple check every God damned thing he sends you, you hear me?” He sighed. “I’ll go see what Aisha’s come up with. And keep my mouth shut.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jake said quietly. _Thank you for trusting me,_ was what he meant.

“You get us killed, Kid,” Clay replied as he headed out the door, “and I’m gonna be real damn disappointed in you.”

“Ain’t we all?” Pooch grumbled. He took a seat on his bed and pulled a new book out of the bag he’d brought in with the burritos. Probably a spy novel—poor guy didn’t get enough intrigue in his real life.

“That went…” Cougar started. He wasn’t going to finish and Jake knew it.

“Yes it did,” he replied wryly. Cougar grinned and sat on Jake’s bed. He was snoozing under his hat in minutes.

Jake thought longingly of the soft mattress and looked at the list of satellites he still had to hack and the folders full of satellite images he still had look through. He wondered if he could hit Aisha up for another laptop so one of the others could help him plow through all of this. But maybe asking her for a computer right now—when he was sort of setting Clay up to turn on her—wasn’t a great plan.

Although… Jake smirked to himself and opened a new window, pulling up the fetch program he’d been using to dig through Max’s money. There was no reason he couldn’t do a little creative financing, right?

He left his puppy to do its work and went back to hunting through another satellite worth of surveillance on the Brazilian rain forest. Hacking these things was getting easier and easier, and this one was Soviet, so it’d be a piece of cake. He grabbed for one of the burritos and gnawed on it while he waited for the stupid space-borne computer to let him in.

*******

The handlink buzzed in Al’s pocket and he looked up at the kid who played at being his boss. The meeting was mostly over anyway, and he’d already given his review of the newest relay design—which was enough like the original design for Ziggy to make him happy.

“Danny, I’m sorry, I need to duck out." He tried to look equal parts eager and embarrassed. "I’m waiting on a call. My niece is expecting.” Or could have been—if he’d had a niece.

The kid with the Wall Street haircut and surfer clothes nodded. “No, cool, man. We got this.”

Al smiled as he walked out and slid the earpiece into his ear on his way to his office. “‘We got this,’” he parrotted, shaking his head in amusement. “Damn kids.”

He closed the door to his office and watched his computer boot up with a map of Mexico and a small blinking light marking a location on it.

“I believe I have found Captain Jensen,” Ziggy told him smugly.

“That’s great, Ziggy,” he praised absently as he checked it out. Oaxaca… “How do you know it’s him—and what’s he doing there?”

“Captain Jensen is currently hacking into a Soviet-era Ukrainian-owned spy satellite,” Ziggy explained. “His style is very distinctive.”

The way she said it, almost flirty, gave Al a momentary smile. “Is Sam going to have to be jealous when he gets back?” he asked teasingly, hoping that would actually happen.

“I don’t understand the question, Admiral,” she replied, mildly confused, which just tickled him even more. “As to why Captain Jensen is in Oaxaca, I’m afraid I can’t speculate. Though he appears to be accessing recent images pertaining to the northern forests of Brazil.”

“Looking for this Max guy?” Al pulled up the area of Brazil that Jensen was apparently focusing on. “Can we help him out with that?”

There was a long moment of silence. “Admiral?” Ziggy’s question was as loaded as any human’s possibly could be.

“This isn’t giving information to the past, Ziggy,” he reminded her. He had to get her to think beyond her programming. “This is now. And it’s for Sam.”

Again, she took a very long time to answer. “It might be possible for me to reprioritize the images shown to him by the satellite. _If_ I knew what he was looking for.”

Al nodded, acknowledging the problem and sitting back to think. “He’d be looking for a complex. Some place Max would hole up, or use for his business. Traffic in and out. Suspicious gatherings around them...”

A torrent of images flooded across Al’s screen, suddenly. “There are eight compounds within the search parameters Captain Jensen is using which may be of interest,” Ziggy stated. After a moment, three lists of images laid out side by side by side. “These are the three most likely positions.”

Al smiled. “I’m glad you’re on our side, Ziggy,” he told her truthfully. “Can you funnel those into his download queue from the satellite without him knowing?”

“Of course, Admiral,” she replied, sounding almost insulted.

“Wish we could contact him,” he mused.

“Captain Jensen would have no memory of the Project, Admiral.”

“I know, Ziggy, I know.” There was nothing to do but go get the guy. Explain to him what happened. Have him pull a gun or run for hills. _Sure, Al, great idea._ “Just… keep an eye on him,” he told her. “I still have to figure out what to say once I get there.”

“It is unlikely that Captain Jensen will remain in Oaxaca once the correct site has been located,” Ziggy commented, adding as an aside, “images have been downloaded to his local computer.”

“Thanks, Zig.” Al thought about it. “Nah, they’ll be on the move as soon as they have the info. But I figure I’d better get down there just in case.” He grinned. “Now I’ve got you back in my pocket, I can finally see about finding him.” He reached for the phone to call in a favor for a quick flight to Mexico. “I want you to figure out which one of those sites is Max’s. If Clay and his team are already headed there when I get to Mexico, we’ll just have to wing it.”

*********

“Gotcha, you son of a bitch,” Jake muttered. He took a sip of his Coke. “I think.”

He’d been expecting something flashy. Some hacienda with a pool that ate up precious Amazon rainforest. He didn’t expect a nondescript little compound with a discreet airstrip tucked into the trees around it, but that was just where Max seemed to have ended up. Jake thanked God it had been in the first batch of downloads from that ancient Soviet piece of junk. He was going blind in here.

The place must have been a lumber processing plant once upon a time and Jake had no idea what Max was doing there now, but it didn’t involve a hell of a lot of people, so that was probably a good thing, as far as infiltrate and eliminate scenarios went.

“Got something, J?” Pooch asked from his seat on the bed across the room. Cougar had woken up from his nap a couple of hours ago and gone off somewhere. Pooch probably knew where he was.

“Yeah, maybe,” he replied, draining the last drops of his Coke and reaching for another. He pulled up a series of stills from a number of different satellites. “A month and a half ago, a caravan of trucks comes in and a small plane lands. All in the space of a week. The plane’s call number says it’s owned by a Goliath subsidiary.”

Pooch stuck a bookmark in his book and sat up. “Yeah, that’s not suspicious,” he observed sarcastically.

“Also not suspicious?” Jake continued, as Pooch walked over to join him, “the plane leaves a week later, along with one truck full of the guys who drove the other eight. Those eight are parked nice and neat right up against the loading docks and have been ever since.” He zoomed in on a corner of one satellite picture, showing a barely visible comm tower sticking out of the treetops. "That went up sometime after the trucks got left there. Can't crack the 'net hookup because of....?" He asked leadingly.

"Hard-key encryption," Pooch answered. Jake was so proud. "Like those drives at Goliath." He took a closer look at the image. “So. Max.”

Jake nodded. “Or some other megaconglomerate asshole.” He stared at the latest satellite shot, THERE thrumming through his soul, though he couldn’t say why. “But yeah, I’m betting Max.”

  

Rounding up the others didn’t take more than half an hour—Oaxaca just wasn’t that big a place—and Jake, who’d been shut up in the hotel room for a week, noticed something wrong with the vibe right off. Pooch and Cougar had admitted that Clay wasn’t hiding the fact that he had a secret quite so well anymore, and Jake saw it in the slight distance between him and Aisha, the more deadly look in her eyes that made his palms sweat.

Shit.

Jake took a deep breath, put it all out of his mind, and laid out what he had. Aisha shook her head at the end.

“It’s not him,” she said coldly, pulling out a sheaf of paper and unfolding it to show a map and a satellite view of a similar compound, though even smaller. “One of my contacts finally came through. He’s in the forest, all right, but more than a hundred miles north of where you’re looking.”

“I checked that one out, too,” Jake said. “Looks like a pretty significant drug operation, but there’s no sign of anything remotely connected to Max.” Jake stared pointedly at Clay, who kept his poker face in place with what seemed a little effort. “I don’t think that’s him, sir.”

Clay held Jake’s gaze for a minute. “You’re sure your source is right?” he asked Aisha, breaking eye contact with his own man. Jake’s heart sank. _God damn it…_

“He hasn’t steered me wrong before.” She moved slightly closer to the Colonel, and now that Jake thought he knew what she was, he really wanted to just shoot her for knowing so well how to manipulate his CO.

“Sir,” Pooch put in, “I really think this is a fix.” He pointed at Jake’s computer. “It’s too precise, too suspicious.”

“Right,” Aisha replied, “ _too_ suspicious.” She scoffed. “Max would never be that careless.”

Clay closed his eyes, and Jake could see him calculating odds in his head. When those eyes opened, though, Jake knew his boss was going to place the wrong bet.

“Cougar,” Clay said quietly, “you and Jensen check out his compound.” He pointed at each of them in turn and winced a little at the betrayal Jake knew he could see in his eyes. “ _Do not_ engage. Strictly surveillance. If it’s Max, get the hell out and get word to us fast.” He looked at Aisha and Pooch—Pooch, who was working like hell to keep his mouth shut. “The three of us’ll take the one to the north. Same rules apply: Don’t try to start something without the rest of us. We take him down as a team.”

Jake didn’t laugh at the hypocrisy in _that_ comment. He was too disgusted. “Yes, sir,” he replied, closing his laptop. “As a team.”

Clay gave him a hard look but at this point, Jake couldn’t care less. “Pooch, secure transport. Cougar and Jake set out at dawn. The rest of us leave at noon.”

And then he was gone, and Aisha left about thirteen seconds after, and Jake just sort of stared at nothing for a minute. “Twisting in the wind it is, then,” he murmured finally.

Cougar shook his head, but his heart wasn’t really in defending Clay’s command choice. “He needs to check them both out.”

“Separately?” Pooch asked, as nervous as Jake was, in his own way. “Man, he damn well better not get any of us killed because of his girl.”

An image popped into Jake’s mind of the fireball that Clay had become THERE—the scream of pain and defiance as he launched himself at Max and dove them both into the sea. Jake had a sinking feeling Aisha had something to do with that.

He stood up abruptly. “Probably get himself killed first,” he muttered. “I need a drink. Anyone else want a drink?” He looked up at his friends and saw that, as quick as they'd been to back him against Aisha, they still weren't sure. He was just so crazy now…

“Yeah, okay." He headed for the door as they didn’t follow. “Cougar, I’ll meet you back here at ten. We can get packing.”

He had a couple of other things to get done, too—contingencies for when all this inevitably went south. Damned if he was going to tell any of the rest of them about them, though. Maybe he was learning his lesson about keeping his mouth shut.

And then he walked out. Because really, he was as on his own on this as he had been on everything else.

Or maybe not quite. He waited until he hit the mercado and pulled out his cellphone, dialling Stegler’s number.

“What do you want?” Stegler answered coldly.

Jake sighed—couldn’t _anyone_ be happy to hear from him? “Thanks for narrowing things down for me. I could have figured out to start in the middle and search outward all by myself.”

“I told you I’d get you what I could—”

“We found Max,” Jake broke in tersely. “Still willing to help out?”

There was a moment of silence over the line and Jake almost started to sweat before Stegler responded with a gleam of anticipation in his voice. “What do you need?”

********  
to be continued...


	6. Chapter 6

**En route to Patuxent River Naval Air Base…**

“Admiral?”

“Yeah, Ziggy? What do you got?” Al was driving like a bat out of hell, hoping he didn’t get pulled over before he got on base. His old friend had said a transport plane was leaving for Mexico City at five-thirty, which, with a fast rental car and a little luck, would get Al to Oaxaca before dawn.

“A call was made from an unregistered cellphone in Oaxaca to a restricted line kept in service by the Central Intelligence Agency,” she replied. Ziggy was using the freedom of the internet to do some amazing things. Al was a little sorry they'd chosen to restrict her access back when the Project was open. “Shortly after that call, a helicopter was requisitioned from the Soto Cano Air Force Base in Honduras.”

“Crap.” Honduras wasn’t close to Brazil, but it was closer than Oaxaca. But if Ziggy was right and the US government had that chopper in Bolivia shot down, why would the Losers be contacting the CIA? Unless it wasn’t the Losers calling…

“Flight plan?” he asked. Not that he wasn’t damn sure they were headed for one of those rainforest compounds.

“None filed,” she replied. “And the team regularly assigned to that vehicle has been put on standby.”

 _The Agency is bringing in their own guys. Or Porteous—he’s a pilot…_ God, he wished he knew more about exactly what was going on here. “Are they teaming up to go after this Max guy or is the Agency going after Clay and his crew?” he wondered.

“Regardless, probability suggests that Colonel Clay’s unit and Max will be in close proximity soon, Admiral.”

Al nodded. He hated this secret agent crap. There was a reason he’d gone into space instead of the SEALS. He juggled his phone and changed lanes, dialing his pal at Annapolis. “Let’s see if Riker’s got anybody headed for São Paolo instead.” Oaxaca would be a huge waste of time, clearly. Things were moving fast and Al needed to get ahead.

It turned out Riker did have a transport headed for Brazil—and there was time enough for Al to slow down slightly and quit courting disaster. At least on home soil.

“I still have no idea how to explain this to that kid, you know?” he said to Ziggy, but mostly to himself. “We don’t even have any proof that Jensen knows anything that could help us.” He smacked a hand against the steering wheel in irritation at the cars slowing him down. “Hell, we’re not even sure exactly where he’s headed, unless you figured out which site we’re looking for.”

“I believe I have it narrowed down to two compounds within a one-hundred-mile area.”

“Well, that’s something, I guess,” Al muttered.

“There is a high likelihood that Captain Jensen and his team would not survive a direct assault on Max’s main compound,” Ziggy reminded him gently.

“I _know_!” Al barked. He did. And the fact that Ziggy kept saying imprecise things like “probability suggests” and “a high likelihood” was making him feel really out of his league and completely in the dark. Solving stuff like this in real-time was infinitely more difficult than having her hunt through historical records and calculate odds from there.

But frontal assaults and covert actions, those were something he knew about. Maybe it was time to help out with one or the other. Whichever the Losers needed. He dialed a Naval exchange and put his phone on speaker.

“São Paulo Naval Detachment, main switchboard, how may I direct your call?”

“Admiral Calavicci for Admiral Marcus,” he said shortly, drumming his fingers against the wheel while he waited. He hadn’t spoken to Barry in a couple of months, but they’d always tried to keep in touch. They’d met in a firefight in Vietnam thirty-five years ago. Al and his team had swooped in and saved Marcus and four other Naval airmen who’d been shot down behind lines. It was kind of ironic when Al was in the exact same position himself less than a year later. Unfortunately, there’d been no one to pull his fat out of the fryer.

Well, there _could have been_ but...

“Al! How are you?” Barry Marcus’s booming, friendly voice washed away the bad memory. “What can I do you for?”

“I’m headed to São Paulo tonight, Barry—”

“Great! I’ll buy you a drink!”

“Uh, yeah great, Bar, but see… I need a little favor.”

Barry sounded suddenly suspicious. “What kind of favor? A Big Trouble kind of favor?”

Al cocked his head in the safety of his car thousands of miles away. “Ah, no. No.” He chuckled wryly. “Well, maybe. Look, I need to borrow a bird. Off the books.”

“Al…” Barry began.

“It’s important, Barry,” Al told him quietly. “You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”

The silence on the line was nerve-wracking, as Al approached the gates of the Naval Air Base and presented his ID at the guardhouse.

“Is this about your missing geek?” Barry finally asked. He was one of the few people Al had been able to talk to who had high enough security clearance for Project Quantum Leap.

Al nodded to the guard on duty and drove more sedately toward the parking lot by the airstrip. “It could be, yeah.” He stopped the car in a space and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “I hope so.”

Barry blew out a huge gust of air. “I’ll have something when you come.” His voice turned more jovial. “I can’t promise you’ll get a top-of-the-line rental, now, but…”

“Thanks, Barry,” Al replied with a sigh of relief. “You don’t know what this could mean.”

“And it’s better if I don’t, buddy,” Barry’s voice softened. “I owe you, Al, you know that. I’ll always owe you.”

Al thought about what he might be flying into and the shitstorm it might kick up if Ziggy was right about Max's influence. “Actually, Barry, I think this one might just make us even.”

***********

Jake and Cougar landed at a broken down airstrip outside of Boa Vista, the flight—and Jake used the term loosely—courtesy of a particularly homicidal air taxi flyer name Juan de Herrera de Concepción. They survived, but Jake’s breakfast very nearly didn’t.

From there, they drove themselves into the park’s dense forests in a truck that had seen better days but handled the rutted, pitted, pathetic forest tracks like a racecar. Cougar was only slightly less unsafe as a pilot, but they got to their bed-down site, three miles from Max’s compound, by sunset. They checked in via satellite relay to find that Clay and the others were en route to their location and would reach it before dawn. They went radio dark after that and Jake rolled over in the night, watching Cougar sit watch, and tried not to worry about the fact that he was pretty sure _someone_ was going to die tomorrow.

He just hoped, as he drifted off, that it was Max.

>   
>  _Cougar was dying. Too many holes, too much blood. He was hugging a bomb. Fucking nuclear bomb the size of one of his niece’s soccer balls…_
> 
> _“Jesus, Cougar, you don’t have to do this—”_
> 
> _“Yeah, I do… Last chance…” God, he was really going to do this! “I gotta end it.”_
> 
> _“I’m comin’ back for you, Cougar.” He nearly choked on the words, but he meant them. Jesus, if Coug could just hold on a little longer..._
> 
> _“Sure, Jensen. Whatever you say.” And then Coug gave him that wry little grin of his—the one that he always had when he thought they weren’t getting out of this. “Least I’ll go out with a bang.”_
> 
> _This was the first, last, and only time he’d be right about that. Jake dashed tears from his eyes. “Motherfucker.”_
> 
> _And then he reached forward and hugged Cougar, hard, trying to pour six years of friendship into seconds they didn’t have to spare._
> 
> _He wanted to stay. God, he wanted to stay right here. Clay was dead. Aisha was fuck-knew-where and batshit crazy. At least Pooch was safe at home with Jolene and the girls. Jake didn’t think he could do this by himself. He didn’t want to try…_
> 
> _But he handed Cougar his hat anyway and watched him straighten it as blood dripped down his face and his chest and his legs… Holes everywhere…_
> 
> _“Rock,” Cougar whispered, his voice wet with the blood in his lungs. The look in his eyes was his own way of telling Jake how he felt about him. It was also a dismissal._
> 
> _So Jake ran. He hit the water, grabbed the minisub, and shot through the pipe. He launched toward the surface like a torpedo with a wail of frustration and grief—_

—and woke up with a strangled shout, which, on the whole, was no longer unusual. He didn’t usually have company, though, and his rude awakening had Cougar turning on him with a gun in his face in seconds.

All Jake could do was stare and try to convince himself that Cougar was really there and breathing.

“Jake, _cálmate,_ ” Cougar grated, voice rough from surprise and worry and annoyance and not from too many holes, too much blood… God _damn_ it—THERE sucked shit! Jake pulled a hand through his hair, sticking it up more and trying to come down from the dream.

Cougar was staring at him, and Jake fancied he could see the words on the tip of his friend’s tongue. He was worried. He figured Jake was finally losing it for good. He was going to call this whole thing off on account of extreme mental instability.

“I’m good. I’m good,” Jake said quickly, pulling himself together, at least by outward appearance. “Just… jitters, I guess.”

Cougar watched him carefully for a while before he sat back down, placing his gun gently at his side. “It’ll be okay. Tomorrow we’re gonna end this, _amigo,_ ” Cougar said, leaning back against the tree he was using as a chairback.

Jake shuddered and tried not to throw up, memories of THERE shaking him. He’d watch Cougar like a hawk tomorrow. Damned if anyone was going to catch the sniper with his pants down.

************

The hollow Pooch, Clay, and Aisha crawled into at 0330 was only one click from the jungle compound that Pooch was almost sure had nothing to do with Max. He was still seething silently about Clay’s choice to split them all up and he hoped the extra ordinance in his vest wouldn’t be needed.

 _Fat chance of that,_ he thought to himself as he dropped his bag carefully on the ground. It held all the expected stuff, of course. His vest was for just in case. He looked over at Clay, somehow gratified to realize that his CO was nervous, too. He should be. This went sideways, and Pooch was going to take it out of Clay’s hide, boss or no.

He looked at their third and sighed. Aisha was fucking Aisha, and Jake’s crazy—but maybe not so crazy—suspicion of her suddenly seemed sort of justified. She was eerily calm and sat down on the undergrowth quietly, shrugging off her own pack and stretching like a friggin’ jungle cat.

 _“She works for herself, guys,”_ Jake’s words came back to him. Cougar’s comment later that week followed right along after it as Aisha started checking her guns. _“She’s not a Loser.”_

“Bed down for an hour,” Clay ordered roughly.

 _Yeah, like that’s gonna happen._ His frustration broke free and Pooch growled low in his throat, which got him a startled look from Clay and a narrowing of the eyes from Aisha. “Can’t sleep anyway,” he said quietly. “I’ll take watch.” It was the absolute closest he’d ever been to telling Clay to shove it up his ass. “Kick you awake at 0430.”

He was surprised when Clay didn’t argue. Pooch watched the two of them bed down and they were asleep quickly. Clay could sleep anywhere, anytime, if a mission called for it and… hell, he’d never actually seen Aisha sleep before. Kind of made him nervous.

For the next half hour, he split his attention between the jungle and the people sleeping behind him and thought about all the shit that had gone down in the last year and change.

Mostly, he thought maybe he should get the hell away from these lunatics and find a way to get Jolene and Jerome out of the States and somewhere safe so they could be a God damned family again. _There’s no safe place as long as Max is alive,_ he reminded himself. He ran a hand across his scalp and fought back the urge to scream. He should have left when he had the chance. Should have just left Jensen bleeding on that drugstore countertop and left Roque to do his freakin’ turncoat thing and left Cougar to be shot in the head by Max’s henchmen. LA sucked anyway, right? Who cared if it imploded from a bomb that belonged on the fucking SciFi channel…

He shook his head, knowing he was full of shit. These assholes were family, too. He didn’t look behind him as Clay let out a sharp snort in his sleep. Even Clay. Which made Aisha the evil stepmother, he—

His gun came up as a twig snapped in the darkness outside of camp.

The distraction was more than enough for the world to explode in his skull, and he spun as he fell, seeing Aisha crouched above him with a rifle in her hands, butt facing him and stained with blood. Pooch tried to get it together, but his eyes were weird in the darkness and his brain was leaking out his ears…

“Do we kill them?”

The harsh distorted whisper was followed by a shadow that crept silently out of the jungle and gave him a boot to the ribs he was already too consumed with pain to really feel. He kept his eyes open to mere slits, hoping they’d think he was out of it.

“No,” Aisha seemed to hesitate over the answer, and Pooch wondered dizzily if maybe she didn’t have it in her to kill her fuck buddy after all. But Clay never made a sound and Pooch cursed himself, realizing that the snort he’d heard probably explained some of the blood on that rifle. He knew for damn sure his head explained the rest. “We’ll leave them for Pereira.” She bent down and grabbed the gun he’d been holding then kicked him, too, for good measure. God damn, he was gonna fucking kill her. “Have Juan let his boss know he got a tip that someone was going to raid them. It would be good to have Pereira owe us for helping him take care of Max’s little pest problem.”

Shit. Was she working for Max? Seriously?

_“She works for herself, guys.”_

“Let’s go,” she ordered. She picked up her pack and Clay’s and gestured for her buddy to pick up Pooch’s. “Time to take care of the rest of our problem. We get rid of the other Losers and bring down Max once and for all.” Fuck…

He didn’t twitch as she stepped over him, or as his buddy kicked Clay, who didn’t so much as sigh at the contact. Fuck, fuck, _fuck_!

It took at least five minutes before he could move, and another five before he felt safe doing it, but a groan in the darkness had him pulling himself upright. He could hear a commotion from the direction of the compound and cursed as he half-crawled over to where Clay was just waking up. They had to get out of here.

More importantly, they had to get to Cougar and Jensen before that bitch did.

And then he was going to owe J one hell of an apology for ever doubting him. Might even have to let him kill Aisha himself, if he was still alive when they got there.

“The fuck happened?” Clay whispered, Sitting up and reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. Pooch took one of his hidden ones out of his vest and shoved it in his boss’s hand as people could be heard spreading out from the camp.

 _Hell,_ Pooch thought, pulling his own favorite gun out of the overburdened vest and thanking God and Jake Jensen that he’d loaded for bear and stealth before they left Mexico, _we’ll be lucky if_ we _live to get there._

And Pereira’s men came crashing toward them.

**********

Dawn broke clear and crisp as Jake took the south approach to the compound and Cougar worked around to the north. Their radios had been off since they signed off with Pooch and Clay last night, because Max had an annoying habit of using a team’s comms against them. Nevertheless, Jake itched to turn it back on and say _something_ ; hear Cougar tell him to get off comms, anything—just to prove his best friend was still alive.

The dream from THERE he’d had last night was too much like a memory for his comfort. THERE always was. And maybe the biggest thing that THERE had been reminding him of lately was how overwhelmingly dangerous both Max and Aisha could be. He tamped down on an urge to contact Clay and make sure things were okay out there.

Not that he wasn’t still completely pissed at his boss, oh no. Separating had been incredibly stupid, and Jake hoped that none of them paid for it with his life. If anything happened to _anyone_ , he was gonna deck Clay. Possibly more than once. He just hoped Pooch believed he was right about all this and would be on guard.

Movement ahead of him had him silencing THERE and all the thoughts it brought up. The loading docks were right in front of his vantage point and he watched a handful of techs in white coats going in and out of the trucks with bits and pieces of electronic paraphernalia.

“Fabulous," he whispered. "More sci-fi bombs."

“He calls them ‘snukes,” a far-too familiar voice replied, as his comm unit was yanked from his ear.

Jake spun around, fear and anger washing over him. “God damn it, Aisha! What the—”

THERE had given Jake a lot of insight in the last few years, but maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t been watching his ass quite as well as he could have, in respect to Aisha. Which made the blade that slid into his gut more of a surprise than it probably should have been.

He’d always known she had her own agenda, and he’d known it didn’t necessarily include the Losers surviving. He just hadn’t figured she’d go for him first—which meant she probably hadn’t and Clay and Pooch were dead. _God damn it,_ when was this shitstorm going to end!? 

“Sorry, Jensen,” Aisha whispered in his now unwired ear, pulling the blade out as she spun him around and shoved him head-first into the wall beside them. “There are some things a girl wants to do on her own, like taking down Max. And you and the rest of them are worth more to my people dead than alive, anyway.” 

_Her people?_ Jake thought inanely. _Who the hell are_ they _?_ His head was ringing from either the crack of his skull on cinderblocks or the blood that was definitely _not_ gushing from his gut. He fought not to collapse in a heap, dimly watching her raise her rifle to draw a bead on Cougar, who was stationed on a roof across the compound from them. It was a long shot, but Jake was betting she could make it. 

Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen, was it? With a burst of speed and strength born completely out of anger at being endlessly screwed around with, Jake straightened up and pinned her to the wall by slamming an elbow into her throat, hitting her hyoid bone with what normally would have been instant killing force, if he himself wasn’t bleeding like a stuck pig.

He stared into her eyes just long enough to see them widen in shock before she started shaking with the need for air. She wasn’t quite out and she wasn’t dead yet, but right now, she had more to worry about than him. He grabbed her rifle and her sidearm as she dropped to the ground, hand trying hopelessly to quell the pain of a crushed windpipe.

 _“Still waters, baby. Fuckbag had it coming.”_

“I am so sick of this shit,” he whispered, knowing he'd said that THERE at some point. He screamed silently as he curled forward and clamped his hand down on the knife wound, blood still seeping out around his fingers.

He tried to reach down to retrieve his earpiece but fell against the wall and slid down beside Aisha's twitching body to where he wanted to be anyway, right next to the damn radio bit. He let go of his gut long enough to thumb on his radio and was speaking before the earpiece was all the way in his ear, hoping the lead to his mic hadn’t been ripped out. 

“Coug, get out, it’s—” Four different guns opened fire somewhere in the complex, covering his shout of surprise as one of them plowed bullets into Aisha’s still moving body in front of him, shutting her down for good.

Which would have been okay, except she was damn small for being such an enormous bitch and she made a crap-ass shield. Jake ducked around the corner of the shed, praying that Cougar was just tucking his head in on that roof instead of already down for the count. He looked at the gun in his hand and his heart clenched. It was Pooch’s.

“God damn, _fuck_!” he yelled, realizing he’d dropped the earpiece again. He wondered if his throat mic was picking up anything and whether Cougar was listening. “Aisha fucked us over. Anyone who isn’t me is a target, okay?”

Four armed mercs in black fatigues were heading for his position and he took out two of them in short order, crowing in relief when the other two went down as well—and then cursing because they'd been brought down not by Cougar, but by _more,_ clearly different, assholes behind them.

“Your people, I presume,” he sniped in the direction of Aisha’s now very dead body. Bitch. He started moving from cover to cover, and as he managed to work his way to a position closer to the main building but better hidden, he realized the players in this drama were too busy going after each other to worry so much about him.

So he kept shooting anything that moved, trying really hard not to bleed to death and keeping an eye on the roof where Cougar was. The hat was there, gone, there, and gone, but shots from that very accurate rifle kept coming, thank God.

Jake was doing pretty well, making sure any bad guys who weren't trying to kill each other didn't kill him instead—right up until he took out one of Aisha's men and spun around to find himself face to face with a woman in blue fatigues, her rifle pointed ruthlessly at his skull.

He had just enough time to register her presence before her head snapped back from a bullet in the brain. He looked up to Cougar’s position to see that stupid hat of his bobbing at the edge of the roof. “Thank you, Cou—”

His call turned far too quickly to a scream of anger as he watched the hat and the body attached plummet the height of two stories. He didn’t see the thud—no one should have to watch his best friend die twice in one lifetime—he was too busy moving forward, gut wound or not, to try to kill every motherfucking thing in his way until he got to Max.

He didn’t even have time to be pissed when a bullet grazed his skull and dropped him cold.

********

**São Paulo, Brazil**

Al looked up at the old Huey in front of him. It was just before dawn and he was glad of his flight jacket in the chilly air.

“This isn’t the one we evaced you out on in Nam, is it?” he joked. The paint job had seen better days, the NAVY tag on the tail all but worn away. She was a utilitarian machine that probably didn’t fly more than once a year, if that, and she'd hold Clay’s team but not much else. He rubbed his hands together a little nervously. “Been a while since I’ve flown one of these old girls.”

Barry Marcus gave him a smile and a shrug in the early morning light. “It’s like riding a bike, right, buddy? She’s a good ship, Al,” he promised. “Armaments aren’t much in today’s world, though.”

Al looked at the machine gun mounted in the back and knew it wouldn’t do him any good anyway. Who the hell was going to fire it? “She’ll do fine.”

“She will, huh?” Barry said, an edge of worry to his voice. “Fine to go where?” He held up a hand. “Not that I want to know, mind you!”

“Better if you don’t,” Al agreed. He zipped up his flight jacket and climbed into the old chopper, looking out at his friend before firing her up. “But if I don’t get her back to you in one piece, I’m sorry!”

“That’s very reassuring!” Barry shouted back over the waking engine as he moved out of the way of the rotors’ wake. “Try to bring _yourself_ back in one piece, okay? You’re no spring chicken, you know!”

Al grunted and waved as he brought the girl up and into the air. “Yeah, yeah. Keep reminding me,” he grumbled to himself. He waited until he’d leveled off to pull out his handlink and hook Ziggy into the comms system, juggling the controls and the device. It wasn’t quite like a bicycle, and he was glad of the long trip to get his flight legs back.

"Tell me you know where we’re going, Ziggy,” he ordered sternly. He had a feeling they didn't have a lot of time before things between Clay's unit and Max came to a head.

*********  
to be continued…


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra chapter today—just because. :)

Jake woke up strapped to a table, and a bizarre sense of deja vu swept over him. He hadn’t been strapped to the last table, had he? He’d popped right up when the Admiral—

“Captain Jensen,” Max called, sounding reasonable and not in any way sane. “Fancy meeting you here. I thought that minx Fadhil would have disposed of you all by now.”

Jake turned his head, the memory he’d almost had washed away by a nearly overwhelming urge to gnaw through his restraints and rip that man’s throat out. “What can I say? We're hard to kill,” he responded with as much of his usual attitude as he could.

Max gestured to someone out of Jake’s line of sight, and a short bald man with a long black beard appeared beside him, carrying a long knife. Which was about the time that Jake noticed he’d been stripped to his skivvies. _Shit._

“Look, Max,” he tried, a greater sense of dread rising in him. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to get from me—”

Max smiled. “I don’t actually want anything.” The bearded man came forward and put a hand _way_ too close to vital manbits for Jensen’s comfort. “I’m just really pissed off at you and your men. And since you’re the only one I have to take out my frustration on…?” He waved negligently. “I’m going to have Mr. Wilson do just that.”

“Wilson?” Jake asked, the pitch of his voice rising as the knife hovered closer to his upper leg. “What’s Tom Hanks really like? You can tell _ME_!” The last word ended on a yelp he couldn’t contain as the knife slid silently under the first couple of layers of skin and sliced down from mid thigh to his knee.

He’d figured there were a lot of ways he could go out. Getting flayed alive wasn’t really one he’d considered.

**********

Fucking bitch! Clay should have known but he still couldn't quite believe it.

His head was throbbing as they drove through the jungle faster than he’d ever seen Pooch drive before—God willing, his transpo officer wasn’t seeing double like him. Luckily Pooch mostly looked pissed and Clay knew from experience that a pissed off Pooch would do damn near anything to help out his team, no matter what shape he was in.

If the rest of the team was even still alive. “Fuck,” he whispered, holding his head as Pooch careened around another curve in the rutted jungle road. He should have just listened to Jensen and done it by the book.

Instead, he and Pooch, both half out of it and severely outnumbered, had had to take down fifteen drug dealers with nothing more than the contents of Pooch’s well-stocked vest and two semi-automatics. Too many bullets and ten grenades later, the drug dealers were chunky bits and Clay and Pooch were left with their thumbs up their asses and the very real sense that Cougar and Jensen were likely in a world of hurt.

“Kid’s never going to let me live this down, is he?” Clay griped as Pooch shot through the trees on his way to the coordinates Jake had given them—the compound that was almost certainly Max’s. Clay wondered if Aisha had known that all along.

“No, he ain’t,” Pooch replied shortly. “And if he dies, I’m damn sure gonna hold the grudge for him.”

Clay nodded, acknowledging his guilt. “Fair enough.”

“God damn,” Pooch whispered in horror as he rolled the jeep to a stop. They'd reached the eastern outskirts of the compound in question and it was an eerily silent scene. With a ton of dead bodies. “What the hell…?”

Clay's stomach churned as they exited the vehicle and took it all in. He realized they were looking at two different groups here, and he wondered why Aisha had bothered with him and his team if this was some strike force she'd put together herself. But then, he thought as he walked forward with his gun at the ready, he and his men had been wasting all their time and energy keeping Max busy for her, hadn't they? _Damn it._

Grunting as he turned over the body of a man whose head had been blown through by a bullet that could have come from Cougar's rifle, he motioned Pooch to take the north side of the compound, while he headed for the south. “Let’s find them,” he said quietly as he scooped up a couple of discarded rifles and tossed one at Pooch. Their guns were probably equally low on ammo. “Comms only if necessary—and for God's sake, keep your head down. Anyone who’s not a Loser is collateral damage, you read?”

Pooch nodded grimly and moved out. “HUA, sir.”

The entire place was one big abattoir. Most of the bodies had gone down from multiple shots and he didn't have a hope of figuring out what part his men had had in this, really. He just had to hope that they had been smart enough to avoid it entirely or had at least managed not to get dead during the proceedings.

He was nearly to the south end of the main building when he saw Aisha, her body curled at the base of a shed that looked across to the loading docks and their silent trucks.

Shit. He’d screwed up before—he’d screwed up badly. But damned if he’d ever let a woman fuck him over the way he’d let her. Would’ve been okay if it was only him. Just desserts, right? But this bitch had split his team in two—might’ve lost him half of them. And for that, he was damn glad she was dead.

Kneeling down next to her, he found that she’d probably _been_ dead before most of the handful of bullet wounds had been inflicted. He spent about two seconds wondering who had crushed her windpipe before he spied the earpiece next to her head. He picked it up, somehow knowing he’d see that stupid ass leopard-print duct tape at the plug end of it—so everyone would know it was Jensen’s. Like someone would steal the damn thing.

“Fuck, Kid,” he whispered to the absent tech, tucking the wire into his tac vest. “Where the hell are you?”

He left her to rot where she lay and headed around the edge of the compound, counting bodies and reading what he could of the evidence. Body count was up to twenty-three, including Aisha. Besides her, five more, at least, he could assume were Jensen's work—it looked like there was only one pistol in play here, and Jake didn’t use a rifle if he didn’t have to. Another seven had gone down to a high-powered long-range rifle that might have been Cougar's. The boys had been pissed, all right. He scanned the grounds, his gaze landing at the base of the building forty yards in front of him, freezing at the sight of a familiar hat.

“Oh God, no,” he whispered, running flat out now, toward the solitary body that lay tangled at the foot of the building. His stomach clenched so hard he could barely draw breath to curse. “No, no, fuck it, Cougar!”

He slid to his knees beside the body and was rolling it over before he processed that the man in the hat was wearing blue fatigues, not jeans and a tank top. He outweighed Clay's sniper by a good forty pounds, too, and sported an ugly-ass exit wound right above his left eye.

He must have been killed by the other side (Clay didn't know which side was which and he didn't really care), but that didn’t explain why he was wearing Cougar’s hat or where the hell Cougar was.

Clay retrieved the damn hat anyway, brushing it off and checking the inside for blood and thinking that Cougar would have to soak it for a week just to get the smell out. He prayed he’d get the chance to hear his man bitch about the damage.

The building the body had fallen from was a small two-story storage unit and it took Clay a three minute sprint to reach the roof. He found shell casings and too much blood, but no Cougar.

Leaning over the edge of the thing, he surveyed the site, his view of the northwest side blocked by the main building.

“Shit,” he whispered, before opening his mic. “Pooch, I found Aisha—”

“Where is that bitch?” Pooch demanded, sounding so much more bloodthirsty and on edge than he should. Which was Clay’s own damn fault. “I’m gonna fucking string her up and—”

“Looks like Jake beat you to it,” he cut in. “Confirmed kill.” He heard Pooch cheer Jensen on, and ignored the twist in his heart that Jake had had to deal with her at all. _Should’ve been my responsibility, kid. That’s why I wanted you two separated._ “But I’m coming up empty on our boys,” he continued aloud. “You got anything?”

“Squat, sir,” Pooch replied angrily. “I'll come around toward the entrance on the northeast side of the main building. Ain’t even many bodies over here. Looks like whoever started this party did their damage thoroughly, though.” His next words were bitter and almost silent. “Would’ve been nice if we’d been here to help our guys through it.”

Clay cursed, fingering the brim of Cougar’s hat and beating himself up a hell of a lot less than he deserved. “Yeah,” he barely whispered. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I’ll head toward you. Hopefully we'll find our boys inside.”

“If they’re even still here,” Pooch growled. “Understood, sir. Meet you there.”

 _Be alive,_ Clay prayed, as he headed back down to the ground to continue his search, crushing Cougar’s hat into a mesh pocket on his vest. _You can flay strips off me if you want, when we’re done, just please, be alive._

******

Jake was too shocked by the pain to scream as the knife slid under his skin again and along the back of it, like slicing the fat off a good lean eye of round. He’d worked the meat department at the local supermarket in high school. He knew what it looked like. Except that he was bleeding the way a side of beef doesn’t. And he was pretty sure he was going to be a dedicated vegetarian from now on.

He ground his teeth and kept silent and thought idly that Roque had loved knives and if he wasn’t atoms in the LA smog right now, that asshole would’ve been the one skinning him.

Or maybe Roque died in Pripyat. Whatever.

“Captain Jensen, why so silent?” Max’s voice had always been really, really irritating. It was even worse now. Jake kept his eyes closed. “Aren't you ready to have one of your pithy little chats?”

For once in his life, Jake wasn’t, which was unfortunate, since the circumstances absolutely screamed for him to make a crack about how he was already a lean piece of meat and didn’t need any trimming. But something about having the skin flayed off you after being shot in the head after watching your best friend die in a firefight kind of killed the mood for your basic heart-to-heart. Even one complete nutjob to another.

Max’s sigh was just as annoying as his voice, but not as annoying as the way he slapped Jake lightly on the cheek, like he was trying to wake a drunk frat brother. It took five further, progressively more brutal smacks before Jake was willing to bother to look up at the man. “I thought you were the one who never shuts up?”

 _I never die, either,_ Jake thought. Still didn’t say anything, though. There wasn’t much point. He was probably the only Loser left, and damned if he was going to give Max shit. His jaw ached with the force of not caving in to the whimpers that wanted to come out.

The biggest psychotic on the planet just looked down at him in irritation. Poor guy—Jake figured he was putting him out. “Mr. Wilson,” Max grated quietly, throwing up that annoying Michael Jackson wannabe hand of his, “please just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Strip Number Three of skin came up with the knife and Jake tensed every muscle to keep himself from screaming. Fuck, it hurt!

“You _can_ scream, you know?” Max told him conversationally. “It’s sort of what I was getting at.” Really—he was like listening to infomercials at four a.m. Max leaned over in his pin-stripe suit and put a hand on either side of Jake’s face, the leather glove on his damaged, useless left hand rubbing painfully against the crease from the bullet that had landed Jake in this position. “There’s no one here to hear you.”

Jake just stared through the guy, wishing he had the strength and the free hand to flip him off.

Max slapped that fish-dead left hand into the blood and hair on Jake’s head, making his brain ring, before stepping back and starting to pace.

“Why _are_ you all still coming after me?” Max wanted to know, sounding like a five-year-old who was being asked to behave. Or maybe he didn’t want to know—it must have been a rhetorical question because he immediately continued, dropping back into that calm and bored speech pattern that just underscored the fact that he was a screaming psychopath. “You brought Fadhil's daughter here, and I should thank you for helping with that little problem, but she and her people did kill a dozen of my men.” He shrugged. “Granted, not the best men in the world, since they’re dead, but still…. Do you have any idea what you’ve cost me with this misguided quest for justice?” Another rhetorical. “Look, I get that I ruined your lives. I killed a few kids. But the head of the CIA won’t even return my calls, now—and that’s just wrong!”

He looked at Jake like he was expecting some sort of answer. “And still, no screaming,” he observed, when Jake decided not to bother trying to come up with any sort of response. Max turned to the efficient Mr. Wilson and gestured him toward the space beyond the head of the table Jake was strapped to. “Let’s move on to more persuasive means, shall we?”

Persuasive means to what? Did he really just want Jake to scream? No one was this crazy, right? It was like a bad B-movie.

The sound of squeaking metal wheels was ominous in the silence. Continuing with the B-movie analogy, Jake figured there probably should have been scary music going, but the increasing ringing in his ears sufficed as he focused on the cart that Mr. Wilson rolled up beside him.

“Fuck, man,” Jake gasped as he stared at what looked like a tractor battery hooked up to a regulator and jumper cables. “Electroshock? Really?”

Mr. Wilson had apparently received prior authorization to proceed, because he grinned a suitably evil grin and stuck a live wire to either side of Jake’s head without so much as warning him. The power wasn't much right at the beginning, and Jake had time to feel the hair stand up all over his body.

“I’m in the habit of getting what I want, Captain Jensen,” he heard Max announce in that disturbingly matter of fact voice as the battery stepped up its intensity, funneling more electricity into his head. Must have been set to go automatically, because Wilson had his hands on the leads and was staring down at Jake with a sick sort of interest. "And when I don't, it tends to make me... well, a little petulant, I suppose."

He probably said more, but that was all Jake heard before the increasing voltage surging through him blocked everything out. It hurt more than anything Jake had ever felt in his life. But more than that, as it hit what— _please, God!_ —had to be maximum output, it broke something in his brain. He didn’t know he had it to break.

It was like having your mind defragmented; a scattered hard drive being torn to bits, its data shoved into any available empty byte. He was never defragging a drive again—he felt sorry for those damn computers all of a sudden.

The world fell apart around him and he screamed long and loud as THERE slammed into HERE with a blinding force he had never dreamed possible. He didn't notice when the electricity turned off.

*********

“Clay, I got movement,” Pooch sounded like he wanted to kill someone. Probably Clay himself, which wasn’t entirely undeserved. “Northwest side.” A long pause and then a curse. “It’s Cougar. He’s injured.”

“Fuck,” Clay whispered, speeding his silent progress along the side of the main building. They hadn’t seen a single live merc on either side since they got here, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any. “Can you retrieve him?”

“Affirmative,” Pooch replied. “Already on my—“ His transmission cut off with a curse.

“Pooch? Report.” _God damn it, now what?_

“I think I got a bead on Jensen’s location. If that’s him screaming, whoever’s got him better hope someone else gets to them before I do.” Clay started running for the northwest side of the complex, hearing Pooch’s heavy breathing as he sprinted toward his goal with an open mic.

“Keep me apprised,” Clay ordered, trying to keep control and make sure they made it out of this. “Where’s Cougar? I’ll pick him up.” He rounded a corner and saw his sniper slouching painfully from one out building to the next. “Scratch it—I’ve got him.”

Cougar wasn't tracking very well, and injured or no, he nearly broke Clay's arm when his CO reached for him.

"Easy, Cougar," Clay murmured. "I got you."

“Jensen.” It was the only word Cougar said as he nodded and fell onto Clay and tried to keep walking. The arm he’d injured in Mexico was bleeding from more than busted stitches, and Clay saw another bullet hole high in his chest, but it all faded away as he became aware of a sound he’d never heard one of his men make. Whatever could make Jensen scream like that was going to be paid for as quickly as fucking possible.

Clay didn’t say another word himself, just hefted Cougar’s sound arm over his shoulders and ran.

*********

Pooch was pretty sure he was going to throw up if Jake didn’t stop screaming soon. He slunk through a long hallway, and could see up ahead what was sure to be a maze of boxes and crates and crap littering the main floor of the warehouse. All the while, he headed for the sound he would beg to make stop if he could. It wasn’t even a rise-and-fall, crests of agony kind of scream. It was a long, sustained, everything you got kind of shriek that scared the shit out of him.

“I wanted him to scream but not like this,” came a clear voice that sounded way on the other side of the room. “If you shock him again, do you think he’ll shut the hell up?”

Fuck. Pooch tightened his grip on his sidearm. Max.

Somewhere ahead of him, there was the sound of electricity flaring, then silence and the faint, so-fucking-unforgettable smell of burning flesh. Funny how Pooch had wanted Jake to stop screaming, too, and now the lack of it terrified him. He tightened his grip on his rifle. “Clay, I’m headed toward Max,” he murmured quietly, not really caring if his throat mic picked it up or not.

It did, and the answer was gratifying, as Clay fell back on the military phrasing he’d worked so hard to rid himself of. “Shoot to kill, soldier. Do not hesitate.”

“Wasn’t planning to, Colonel.”

And just as Pooch was approaching the first pile of crates on the main floor, all hell broke loose.

A small group of scientists and a half a dozen guards spun around to stare at him as one of them called out a warning. The guards were beaten up and clearly all that was left of Max's crew but were set on protecting the scientists. Pooch dodged behind more crates and tables as he moved forward, shooting anyone in his path.

“Shit. I got a dozen-plus bogies, sir. Northeast corner of the building.”

“Head shots, Pooch,” Clay told him, sounding like he must have been shouldering most of Cougar’s weight at this point. “We don’t need anyone coming back on us.”

“Oh, don’t worry, boss,” he said, peeking around a crate and firing with deadly precision. “They won’t be coming back.”

**********

Jake blinked as the world he knew and the world he’d seen snatches of over the last five years melded together into a seamless jumble of chaos. It all buzzed and wavered with the blood rushing through his skull, but he could remember everything that happened THERE now.

Max stood above him like the angel of death he was and he was also dead in Cougar’s nuclear explosion but also dead from the fireball that had been Clay, charging him on the oil platform known as New Jerusalem.

Because there were two of him THERE. Two Maxes. Fuck, did that mean there were two of him HERE? He had to tell Clay. Who was dead from the same fireball, but probably also from Aisha (the total fucking bitch) who must have killed Clay and Pooch before coming here to do the same to Max, except now she was dead HERE and probably dead THERE (but maybe not, because, you know, she _was_ Aisha) and he couldn’t be happier about that, except that if (and it was kind of a huge if, he knew) anybody else was still alive HERE, there might be more of “her people” out there, and THERE they’d been jihadists, but he just couldn’t see that happening HERE and _FUCK_ but his head hurt!

“What is all the noise out there?” Max asked, turning to the door and pulling out a ridiculously large gun. Like, stupidly ridiculous. No one even made guns that big, did they? Actually, maybe Jake's eyes were fried, too. “Come on, people, I just got him to shut up, now all of you have to start up as well?”

Guns. Gunfire. Cougar going down in a hail of bullets before blowing himself to hell with a fucking nuclear bomb and falling from a roof with his hat firmly on his Godforsaken head.

“Mr. Wilson,” Max said, a touch of worry suddenly in his voice, though Jake could tell he was fighting like hell to hide it. “Perhaps it’s time we gathered up what we can and made our departure.” He looked down and met Jake’s eyes, and Jake knew he was dead.

And right that moment, he seriously didn’t give a shit. As long as it stopped the rapid-fire horrors in his head, he might even help it along.

“Kill Captain Jensen and get everything loaded on the helicopter.”

A helicopter. Jake giggled. Fabulous. Did anything good _ever_ come from escaping in a helicopter? They always blew up. Always.

Max looked at him in disgust as he laughed. “Kill him quickly. He’s obviously insane.”

Jake let out a louder bark of mirth. “Jesus, man. Pot, meet kettle!”

And that was exactly when the asshole spun around to watch Pooch burst in the door and shoot him right between the fucking eyes.

*******  
to be continued….


	8. Chapter 8

It felt damn good to see the blood run from the extra hole in Max’s skull. The annoyed surprise on his face as he died was even better. 

But then Pooch looked beyond his falling body, and every fiber of his being wanted to resurrect the son of a bitch so he could torture him slowly, as he'd clearly been doing to Jake. Jensen’s eyes were glassy and he was tittering. His face was bloody and tear-streaked, his right thigh was a mess of gore and skin, and his stomach sported a wound that had been hastily patched too long ago and had blood seeping slowly out of the bandage. 

“Jake?” Pooch whispered as he approached the table carefully and snapped the restraints with his knife. Though Jensen's eyes were open, Pooch got no response, not even a twitch from hands that were beet red from the lack of circulation. Just those mad giggles that were seriously weirding him out. “Jensen, come on, man.” 

Jensen finally focused, an off-kilter smile on his bloody face. “You lived here, too,” he said inexplicably. “Good. Good. Awesome." His speech was garbled, like his jaw had been injured somewhere along the way and he couldn't quite form the words. "Clay's dead again though, yeah?” 

_Again?_ Pooch shook his head. "No, man," he assured him, though J had sounded as if the fate of their CO was completely academic. "Clay's alive. We all are, long as you stay with me, okay?" Shit, they needed to get Jensen out of here. 

One swollen red hand twitched and Jake's eyes closed again. "Not everybody," he muttered matter-of-factly, and Pooch didn’t know if he was talking about himself or one of the rest of them. "Can't all live, right?" 

“ _Pooch, report,_ ” came a bark from Clay in his ear, distracting him from Jake's placid face. “ _I have a shitload of bodies in here and you damn well better not be one of them._ ” 

Pooch looked down in surprise to find he must have smacked his radio set at some point and switched off his mic. He flicked it back on. “I got Jensen, boss,” he replied quietly. There had to be something around here to staunch the flow of blood from his teammate’s thigh. Jake didn’t even seem to notice the damage and Pooch realized the blood on his face was from a gunshot graze high up on his forehead. That explained the crazy. And of course there was the belly wound. _God damn it!_ “He’s rough. Like, seriously rough.” 

Jake propped himself up on his elbows—which Pooch was sure he shouldn’t have the strength to do—and his unfocused gaze roamed around before lighting on Max’s still form. “He’s dead again, huh? Well that's something, at least." 

_Seriously rough and bug-fucked nuts,_ Pooch amended silently. He hoped it really was just the head wound talking. The knot on the back of his own head throbbed as he tried to concentrate on what needed doing. 

He saw a pack off to the side, filled with a standard army kit, and pulled out some supplies. “No way we’re getting him out of here in that jeep I commandeered,” he told Clay over his throat mic. “We need med-evac.” From whom and to where, who the hell knew. 

“ _Cougar’s not much better,_ ” Clay replied. “ _We need to secure the compound. Find Max and eliminate him. Might have to stay here a while before they’re ready to move._ ” 

“Max is dead,” Pooch said, satisfaction flushing him again as he glanced at the dead body. “Confirmed clean kill.” 

Clay’s pride and relief carried clearly over the radio. “ _Well done, Sergeant. What’s your 20?_ ” 

Pooch gave it to him and received assurances that Clay was on his way. And then he turned back to Jake, who hadn’t moved since he spied Max’s body and was now just staring vacantly. Pooch slapped a couple of bandages on that filetted thigh, concerned when Jake didn't even flinch. He was both glad and disgusted to see the skin hadn’t been completely removed. Was going to be ugly as hell, but maybe the damage could be healed. 

The belly wound was a knife jab, not quite deadly deep but deep enough. Pooch wondered if that was Aisha's doing. He cleaned it up, bound it as best he could, and moved on, taking a full inventory of the torture while Jake stayed still as a statue. He found small burns mostly hidden in Jake’s hair and looked around again to find the source, freezing as he spied a jacked up battery on a cart off to the side, naked leads dangling from it. 

“Fuck, man,” Pooch whispered, horrified as he realized that Jake's speech probably had nothing to do with a physical injury—his fucking _brain_ was fried. Anger welled up in him again. Max and the bitch both got off too damn easy— 

His inner tirade was stopped cold as the sound of a chopper’s rotors filled the air. It was a big one, too. Military transport. 

“ _Pooch, be advised, we have airborne incoming,_ ” Clay announced unnecessarily. “ _Headed out to recon._ ” 

“What the hell?” Pooch growled. “Who would be flying in here?” 

Jake finally collapsed back from his elbows and closed his eyes. Pooch took the opportunity to make a closer examination of the burns. “Stegler,” Jensen whispered. 

“Huh?” Pooch wondered if this was a delusion on Jake’s part or something real. “Why would Stegler show up here?” 

Jake waved his hand awkwardly. “I called him. Figured since Clay wouldn’t back me up... The enemy of my, you know, whatever.” 

The bitterness in his statement couldn’t be denied, and Pooch took a chance that this was real. 

“Jensen says it might be Stegler, sir,” he said quickly. “Maybe don’t shoot first?” If the CIA Agent didn’t want them dead, maybe he could get them out. 

Clay cursed over the line. “ _No promises. We have disembark._ ” 

******** 

Clay watched from a grimy window as a craggy old man in a suit that was ridiculous for a military operation exited the helicopter with a handful of soldiers dressed in black and armed for a fight that was already over. 

"Sit your ass here and don't bleed to death," Clay ordered, as he directed Cougar’s controlled fall to the ground just inside the main building. He received a barely conscious grunt in acknowledgment, but there was nothing more he could do for his sniper right this second. He just had to pray that Pooch really had cleared the building. 

At least he knew the docking bays and trucks were clear. He fingered the little box in his pocket, glad he'd checked them out before the supposed cavalry arrived. He took a deep breath and walked out of the shelter of the doorway, gun immediately trained on the old man’s skull. 

“Well, Colonel,” the man said, sounding like he was being very purposeful about not using Clay’s name. “Looks like you’ve just left us the clean up here.” 

The soldiers didn't point their guns at him, but he could feel their uncertainty. His own aim never wavered as he considered his options. Damn, there were too fucking many players in this game! 

“Who the hell are you?” Clay demanded. 

“The guy who’s going to save your ass, buddy. Don't sound so ungrateful.” The old man waved at his men to fan out and search the place—clearly more to get them out of the way than because they needed to be counting dead bodies. “This is a fucking mess, Clay," he grumbled, once the team was occupied. "What the hell have you been doing? Where’s your team?” 

Clay blinked, stepping closer and never lowering his gun. “You Stegler?” he asked. At the man’s nod, Clay growled. “What the hell do you want with my tech?” 

“Maybe you should ask him. After all, _he_ called _me_.” Stegler’s smirk was way too smug for a man with a gun to his head. Made Clay nervous. And when Franklin Clay got nervous, he usually got angry. 

“Listen, you son of a bitch—” 

Rotors filled the air again—these ones lighter and faster—and both men turned their eyes to the skies to see another chopper headed toward them. 

“Sir, we have airborne incoming!” shouted one of the soldiers, gesturing for his teammates to train their rifles on the small 60s-era Huey that was maneuvering to land nearby. The call numbers and US NAVY on the tail were all but worn away by time. 

Stegler shook his head. “No shit, lieutenant. I’m old, not blind.” 

Clay pulled Cougar’s sidearm from its hiding place at his back and trained it on the newest arrival without losing his bead on Stegler. What the hell was he was going to do if another squad of soldiers came pouring out of that one, too? His head was going to split open soon, as much from the confusion as the crack to the skull he’d taken that morning. 

Surprisingly, a single man climbed down from the rig. Not as old or as beaten down as Stegler, the guy was still clearly past retirement. He had a Walther PPK dangling from one hand, his fingers nowhere near the trigger and both hands raised to his shoulders. His leather jacket was the kind upper echelon officers bought to remind themselves of the old days and sported a Navy insignia. 

“Colonel. Everything okay here?” he called out, keeping a wary eye on Stegler and his men. Clay got the bizarre idea that the guy wouldn't hesitate to fire on the heavily armed Air Force team if Clay needed him to. 

He contemplated just shooting both of them. “What the fuck is going on here?” he demanded, as the second old guy made his approach. Clay could feel Stegler’s boys getting antsy. “Who the hell are you?” 

The new guy didn't answer right away but chanced a more thorough look around. Again, Clay could swear the guy was assessing the threat, not to himself, but to Clay. “I was expecting fewer flyboys and more Losers, Colonel,” he continued pointedly. “Where are your men?” 

“ _Sir, if either of those airborne has medical attached, I could use them, pronto,_ " Pooch called over the radio, his worried voice stopping the tirade Clay really wanted to let loose. “ _Pretty sure J’s gonna bleed to death on me before too long._ " 

Clay stared at the two men in front of him. Stegler seemed like an Agency asshole, ready to screw them over because that was what spooks did. But Jensen had trusted him enough to call him in as backup, and Jake’s instincts had been a hell of a lot better than Clay’s in the recent past. He didn’t know who the fuck this Navy yahoo was, but the guy knew about the team, and though he’d obviously come in expecting trouble, he’d come in alone, which was either completely foolhardy or showed a degree of trust that Clay and his men wouldn’t shoot him where he stood. 

“ _Boss? You read me?_ ” Pooch was passing the point of calm detachment. 

“Understood,” he replied, stowing Cougar's sidearm to free up a hand. He pegged the Navy man with a glare. “You—do anything I don’t like and you won’t live to enjoy that retirement.” Without waiting for a response, he whirled on Stegler. “You got a medic on your team?” Stegler nodded, waving a young kid forward, and Clay gestured with his gun for all three of them to precede him into the warehouse. “I have two men down. You want to help, you’ll stabilize them and get me some damn evac.” 

Navy looked genuinely worried about the casualties. Who the fuck was this guy? 

“Name's Calavicci," he introduced himself as they walked, staying close so maybe Stegler wouldn't hear. "I know you have no idea who I am, Colonel Clay, but you can trust me." 

He tried not to laugh at the man's earnest claim—right now, Clay wasn't sure he'd trust his own mother. “I'm not a colonel anymore." 

They’d reached Cougar, who had passed out at some point in the proceedings, and the Navy man knelt down next to him as Clay did. “I can help with the evac," the guy promised. "As long as your Agency pal there has a safe place to put them.” Damn, Cougar was still bleeding. 

The medic crouched, opening his kit. Clay glared at Stegler, who stood above them, unmoved by the blood and the worry. “Trust me, this asshole is not my pal.” 

He nodded to the medic who slapped a pressure bandage on the arm wound and cocked his head at the chest wound that wasn’t bleeding nearly as much. That he just taped a gauze over and gestured that Cougar could be moved. Clay let the Navy guy take Cougar’s other side and they hefted the unconscious sniper between them. He trained his gun on Stegler and the medic and nudged them forward. “Let’s go.” 

********** 

Pooch cursed as Jake’s eyes closed again. 

“No, come on, J,” he griped quietly. “I need you awake here. Talk to me.” 

Jensen snorted. “Always telling me to shut up.” And then he giggled again, which was way more disturbing than it should have been. “Shot Roque all to hell for you, but you left anyway, didn’t you? Bitch.” His eyes opened again but he wasn't really looking at anything and his words still sort of forced themselves awkwardly out of his mouth. "I get it—you had Jolene and the girls. Family, right?" Pooch felt a jolt in his chest at the sad comment, confused as it was. "I'll give you credit for coming back, though. Too fucking late to save Clay and Cougar, but you came back." 

Pooch ran a hand over his head, hissing as it did nothing more than smear Jensen’s blood on his scalp. “Jake, you gonna start making sense soon? Please?” 

Jensen's eyes focused on Pooch and he let out a full bellied laugh that was clearly all kinds of painful. “Doesn’t seem real likely right now, man, no.” His laughter died off, along with most of his breath as he shifted his gaze to stare at the ceiling. “Ow.” 

“Just hang on, buddy, okay?” Pooch whispered as Jensen's eyes closed again and his rapid breathing evened out slightly. Pooch was rattled more than he thought he could be by the utter lunacy in his friend’s eyes. He’d done what he could for Jake’s injuries—which wasn’t much—but the guy’s brain was all over the place. Pooch couldn’t help thinking that damn battery might have stripped off what was left of Jake’s sanity, which had been on kind of shaky ground for a while already. 

The sound of a small group approaching from the main floor had him cocking his glock and training it at the entrance. 

“Shoot me later, Sergeant,” Clay called out in greeting, his voice echoing in the large space beyond the door. “Right now I got a medic and a couple of visitors.” 

_Visitors?_ Pooch stowed his sidearm and watched Clay and an old guy in a Navy flight jacket carry Cougar into the room. The guy definitely didn't look like CIA. A kid with a medkit and another old guy in a cheap suit who looked exactly like CIA followed. The young soldier turned to tend to Cougar, but was waved off by Clay. “Cougar’s holding his own,” the Colonel said, though that seemed damned dubious to Pooch. “Check the kid.” 

At that, the old guy in the flight jacket lifted his gaze from where he’d been helping to settle Cougar on a dusty couch in the corner, and Pooch watched in confusion as the guy’ s face fell when he stared at Jake. “He gonna be okay?” The man asked quietly. 

Pooch glanced at Clay for some sort of sign and got a diffident shrug in return. “Max was torturing him. Cutting—his leg’s hamburger.” He swallowed hard and met Clay’s eyes. “Asshole had a car battery, man... he seems pretty fried.” 

“Fuck,” Clay whispered, anger and guilt in his tone. 

The old guy rose from the couch and approached the table where Jensen was laid out, his eyes raking over the battery and its leads sadly, like he’d been there before. “Aw, kid,” he said quietly, walking around to the other side of the table, making sure to give the medic room to tend to what he could. 

“Who the hell is that guy?” Pooch muttered, sitting on the edge of the couch and checking over Cougar's injuries for himself. Surprisingly, he really wasn’t that bad off. From the amount of blood down his arm and side, the arm wound might have nicked something, but the pressure bandage that had been put on wasn’t leaking yet. The chest wound was blessedly shallow and Coug’s breathing was fast, but steady. “Does he know Jensen, or what?” 

Clay shook his head, watching as the medic tended to Jensen’s leg. Pooch twitched as the guy took the bandage off that thigh, the damn thing already thick with blood. It just kept coming. “No clue, buddy,” Clay told him, gesturing to the other old guy, who was checking out Max's body. “Stegler didn’t recognize him, either. Just landed in this ancient Navy chopper right after him.” 

Huh? “The fuck does the Navy want with us?” 

“Like I said,” Clay started, and they both finished, “no clue.” 

“Captain Jensen, are you with us?” the Navy man asked quietly. His tone wasn’t so much familiar as… Pooch wasn't sure exactly what it was, but it confused the hell out of him. 

Surprisingly, Jake answered, his words tight and clenched and garbled. "Loaded question." Pooch had thought Jensen had lost his fight with sleep, but he was rolling his head and looking around in a daze. His face turned back to the man standing over him. “Who are you?” 

Clay stiffened next to Pooch, his eyes hardening again. Stegler was done checking out Max's body and was leaning up against a wall, watching silently. His lieutenant came in and the two started talking in quiet tones. Clay flicked a glance at them, something brewing in his head as he dipped a hand in his pocket quick—checking to make sure something was there. 

“No reason you’d remember me, kid,” the old guy replied to Jensen. “We met about five years ago—just briefly.” 

Jake came up on his elbows again and Pooch could see the pleased surprise on his bloodied face. “No, I mean who _are_ you?” he repeated. “You’re not from here, you’re not from there.” Jake’s eyes closed but the Navy guy’s widened in shock at the nonsense words, like they meant something. “If there’s a someplace-else I’m supposed to be now, can I sleep first? This is exhausting.” 

“Uh…” Navy cocked his head in question to the medic, who nodded. "Sure. Sure, kid. You... take a little nap." 

"Okay," Jensen relaxed down onto his back, his voice placid. It wasn't even that end-of-my-rope blank tone J sometimes got. It was this sort of childlike simplicity. It was scary. 

Pooch exchanged a look with Clay, who was clearly about ready to shoot Navy. Pooch figured the boss had been hoping Jake would be able to explain why their surprise guest was here. 

"His brain is really fried, Colonel," he reminded him. "He's talking pretty crazy. Worse than he's been the whole time." 

Navy's eyes narrowed as he watched them and Pooch wondered what the hell that was all about. 

"Hey wait, I do know you!" Jensen exclaimed suddenly, causing Pooch to jump. Navy seemed positively giddy for a second until Jake continued. "You're an astronaut. Calavicci, right?" 

Calavicci—if that was actually his name—smiled sadly, disappointment on his face. "Yeah, kid. Yeah. Not too many people remember these days." 

"No way, man," Jensen slurred, fading as if the revelation had drained all his strength. "Had all the trading cards..." 

Calavicci let out a long sigh and closed his eyes for a second as Jensen drifted off again, and Pooch shook his head. "What in the hell is going on here?" 

“Sir?” The young medic turned to face Clay, who stood, which made the kid nervous. “Um, your man is stabilized. For now.” He was almost apologetic. “It would be best if we got him to a medical facility quickly.” 

Clay grunted at the likelihood of that happening. Pooch figured his boss must be feeling like he was: aching and mad and bone-fucking-weary. Stegler's lieutenant had left at some point, and Clay walked over to the spook and stood beside him. Pooch could see the guilt in his eyes as he got his first good look at what that asshole had done to Jake. But predictably, Clay’s jaw clenched and his eyes froze over and his tone was as cold as death as he directed his words to the man beside him. 

“So where are we holing up, Agency Man?” 

"Wherever it is," Jake whispered, loud in the silence— _Jesus, isn’t he ever gonna pass out?_ —"I want to go with the spaceman." 

Clay's gaze, when he leveled it at a wryly smiling Calavicci, was a little less deadly and a little more curious than it had been. Pooch braced for trouble. 

"Don't worry, Kid," Clay replied. "We'll keep your new buddy there _real_ close." 

************* 

Any other time, Al would have taken exception to being prodded forward with a gun in his back. Right now, he had no problem with Franklin Clay doing pretty much whatever the hell he wanted, if it got Jensen and his pal the medical help they needed. 

Jensen. God, that poor kid. Memories of Sam, and of his sister Trudy long before, tried to swamp him—actual electroshock machines were no more safe or kind than that raw battery. Al pushed the images back with long practice. The kid needed help and now was not the time to wallow. 

He was going to have to get one of the team to trust him enough to explain that “worse than he’s been the whole time” crack, he realized, as he thought about the words Jensen had used. Al had called the timelines Before and After until there were too many of both—Here and There worked just as well. This could be good news as far as getting Sam back. _If_ Jensen was sane enough to help once they got him somewhere safe. If his connection to Sam had been making him aware of timeline changes since 1998, though... 

He watched Porteous carry the backend of Jensen’s stretcher like the crown jewels were on it. He seemed like a safer bet than Clay, who held one gun on Al and Stegler’s medic holding the front of the stretcher, and the other on the soldiers who’d been drafted to help drag Carlos Alvarez to the chopper. Alvarez was vaguely with it, staring at Jensen as the stretcher was carried in front of him. 

At one point, Clay had disappeared while Stegler's soldiers secured the scene, leaving Porteous to keep watch, and he seemed calmer when he came back. Al figured, if Jensen and Alvarez had been his boys, he would have needed a minute, too. 

The colonel wasn't being subtle about his distrust of Al’s surprise appearance. He had obviously heard of Stegler, though he didn’t seem to actually know the guy. But even suspicious though he was, Clay’s demeanor said he wanted to know what was really going on more than he wanted the gratification of just blowing someone away. 

“Pooch!” Clay called, as the stretcher was settled in Al’s little bird. “You’re flying.” He grinned a deadly grin at Al, who had already started climbing into the cockpit. “He can fly and shoot at the same time, Calavicci,” he warned. “You might not want to make any sudden moves.” 

Stegler came up from behind, pissed off. Clay had insisted the Losers fly in Al’s bird—mostly so that they could have control and keep an eye on Al himself, he was sure—and Stegler obviously knew his chance to steer this whole thing where he wanted it go was disintegrating. 

“I made some calls. Got a safehouse that’ll be waiting when we get there.” He looked Al up and down and Al didn’t bother to do the same. “I still don’t like this,” he griped. “You don’t even know who the hell this guy is or what he wants.” 

Clay smirked. “I don’t know who the hell you are, either,” he reminded the spook. Al hid a smile at the guy’s moxie. “He tries anything, Pooch’ll kill him.” He patted the machine gun rig on the side of the Huey significantly. “You try anything, I’ll kill you. Now where the hell are we going?” 

Stegler gave them the coordinates and Al waited until Porteous was in the pilot’s seat before obeying Clay’s unspoken command to strap into the co-pilot’s position beside him. Stegler’s medic fidgeted, all kinds of uncomfortable to be shut in with Clay and his team as his fellow soldiers secured Alvarez and went back to their own transport. The kid seemed to be concentrating on tending to Alvarez and Jensen and trying to ignore the deadly man with the gun pointed at him. 

“We’ll follow you, Stegler,” Clay told the CIA agent. “If I see one sign of pursuit, I’ll shoot you out of the sky.” 

Stegler snorted, sounding old and bitter. “If someone starts following us, they’ll probably shoot me down before you get there. You think anybody in charge wanted Max dead?” 

Clay smiled cynically. "Better than us catching him alive so he could name names, right? That'd really fuck up the next elections." 

Al thought about that, wondering what power this Max guy had really held. He looked at the handlink, tucked away under the steering column but still hooked into the comms. Ziggy had been digging into Max without a lot of success, but maybe the Losers and this Stegler guy had more information. Al was still hoping they could come up with enough dirt to get Clay and his boys their lives back, but more than that, he wanted whatever Max had his hands in stopped. The more he learned about the guy, the happier he was Max's body was wrapped in plastic on Stegler's chopper. 

That helicopter lifted off, laden with that and whatever else Stegler had decided couldn’t be left until a clean-up crew got here. Porteous waited a long minute to give the big chopper airspace before lifting off smoothly. After five minutes, Porteous leaned back into the main cab and called, “Think we’re clear, boss?" 

Clay's voice was darkly amused. "Guess we're gonna find out." 

Confused, Al spun in his seat to see Clay with what looked like a detonator in his hand and a vindictive smile on his face. “Fire in the hole, boys!” 

The ground below them shook visibly and the air fought Porteous’s rotors. A sudden huge explosion of mud and dirt and tree bits started trying to escape the ground around the compound before it all got sucked improbably back in on itself. The whole violent jumbled mass of an implosion took only a few seconds and left a half-mile crater of nothing in its wake. It was as if the entire complex had been sucked into a black hole. 

_Jesus,_ Al thought, shock blanking his mind for a long moment. 

“ _Huey 45, this is Huey NR896,_ ” a panicked call came over the radio. “ _What the hell was that?_ ” 

Clay’s satisfied voice drifted over comms. “I’m damn sure hoping it was the last of its kind.” 

Porteous grinned and turned back to the flight path, sparing Al a quick glance and probably seeing the shock still on his face. “Clay found three of those scifi bombs of Max’s. Figured the CIA didn’t need them so he locked down the truck they were in and rigged the remote.” _God, there’d been three of those?_ “You didn’t know about those, huh?” 

Al shook his head. “No. Jesus…” He pulled himself together with difficulty. _A weapon like that could send the US into a world war in a second. No way the president and Joint Chiefs could let an attack by something like that stand._ “I knew Max was bad news, but…” 

“But you came for Jensen, yeah?” 

Al looked over at Porteous in surprise, and the young man smiled tightly. Al suddenly noticed the blood on his collar and realized that Alvarez and Jensen weren’t the only ones who needed medical attention. “He don’t know you, but you know him.” 

“Yeah,” Al murmured, thinking again about the fact that Jensen was processing memories from both timelines simultaneously, maybe as a result of the electrocution. Electricity and leaping didn’t mix in the best of circumstances, and Jensen didn’t have the buffer that passing the connection through Ziggy had given Al. 

“Yeah,” he repeated. “I know him—reminds me of me.” Before Porteous could jump on that, he continued. “It sounds like he’s been slipping before this?” 

Damn it. Too soon. Porteous’s whole demeanor shut down and he faced forward. “Man, I got no idea why you’re here, but I ain’t saying shit about nothing until Jensen's back up and running.” He tapped his gun, pointed clearly at Al’s belly, against the steering column. “Until then, keep your mouth shut.” 

Al sighed, wondering if he was ever going to get a second to talk to Ziggy about this. He was pretty sure they’d keep him under guard 24/7 until Jensen came around. Given what he knew of what the Losers had been through, Al was pretty sure getting the Captain to trust him was going to be a tall order. 

********  
to be continued…


	9. Chapter 9

**Antigua, West Indies  
CIA safehouse Charlie 54**

> The initial salvo took him by surprise, and Carlos cursed, waiting for Jensen to click on his radio and tell him how he’d tipped off Max’s men. Carlos had, of course, never turned his own radio off. Unlike Jake, he could keep his mouth shut, and he wanted it on in case Jake ran into a problem. Which he clearly had.
> 
> The first words Jake said, though, had Carlos looking at the eight men charging across the yard, guns blazing, in a whole new light.
> 
> “Coug, get out, it’s—” His voice was pained and it cut out for a long moment. Carlos held his breath until Jake spoke again. “God damn, fuck!" he cursed viciously. "Aisha fucked us over. Anyone who isn’t me is a target, okay?”
> 
> “ _¡Coño!_ ” Carlos gritted out, and started firing on anything he saw that wasn’t Jake.
> 
> There was a lot to shoot at.
> 
> Jake weaved around the compound, his posture bent over too much for pure stealth. He was obviously hurt, but his aim was good and he kept up an intermittent stream of bitching and commentary that he probably didn’t even realize he was spewing. It was always comforting to hear during combat and Carlos let it be the backdrop as he continued firing on anyone who got too close to his tech.
> 
> “You know,” Jake muttered a little breathlessly at one point, “normally, I hate being ignored, but right now? Not so bad.”
> 
> “Be careful. No one can ignore you forever,” Carlos answered with a smile. It was the first time he’d opened his mouth since the firefight started, but he knew Jake would hear him, even over his own nattering. “Lucky for you—”
> 
> He cut off with a gasp as a rifle round drilled through the back of his already injured right arm. He gritted his teeth and let the momentum spin him around, firing as he turned and taking down the man who'd just fired from beside the stairs. But not the man coming up the stairs behind him. That man pointed his gun at Carlos's head from far too close to miss.
> 
> Carlos always thought he’d die on the ground, not in a sniper’s nest. And he still had the chance—the man’s cruel smile died with him as a bullet entered the back of his skull, punched through the front, and embedded itself in Carlos's chest, setting off an explosion of pain that was, shockingly, not as bad as the pain in his arm.
> 
> “Shit!” He hissed, reaching up to feel for the bullet wound even as he searched around him for the hidden shooter. He saw him—on higher ground on top of the main building. Hitching his rifle up to the edge of the roof that faced that building, Carlos braced it against his left shoulder trying to ignore the pain as he fired. The other man slumped out of sight and didn’t rise.
> 
> Carlos let himself breathe for a minute to prove that he could. The bullet in his chest must have been slowed down a lot by its intended victim’s skull, and he thought he could actually feel it as it gritted against his rib. So not deep, not deadly, just painful as all fuck.
> 
> The arm, on the other hand, was bleeding. Badly. He couldn’t stay up here and Jake was already injured. They had to fall back; wait until Aisha and her people and Max and his people finished fighting it out.
> 
> “It’s time to get out of here, Jensen,” he said quietly, turning to the dead men behind him. His right arm had gone partly numb, but God, his chest hurt! “I’ll try for a distraction and we can make for the treeline. Leave the slaughter and see who comes out on top.”
> 
> The man with his head blown through looked lighter than the other one. Marginally. Carlos dragged him toward the edge and held in a scream by letting out a whimper. He had the body ready to roll off the roof and reluctantly set his own hat on that gory head. It was going to take forever to get it clean again, but if Aisha was still alive down there, it might make her think he was already down for the count. He realized that Jake hadn’t answered him yet, but from the sound of the grunts and noises over the mic, he was busy—he hadn’t been taken out while Carlos was otherwise engaged.
> 
> “Remember where my hat lands,” he counseled a little louder, by way of warning. “It will be on the dead guy.” He tried not to think about how much this would hurt. _Drop the body, make a run for it, meet up with Jake..._
> 
> “And another one’s gone,” Jake whisper-sang under his breath at that moment, because he had to make it a joke, of course. “And another—”
> 
> The singing broke off suddenly and Carlos swung his gaze down to the ground to find Jensen face to face with a rifle. He didn’t even bother to breathe this time—he just fired. The force of the shot causing him to dislodge the body beside him and it fell, headed for the ground far below.
> 
> "Thank you, Coug—NOOOOO!”
> 
> It took a second of that anguished scream for Carlos to realize that Jake, for some reason, thought _he_ had fallen. “Jake, distraction, remember?” he called sharply. "It's just—”
> 
> But Jake wasn’t listening. He was standing up, breaking cover with a look of complete fury on his face. Carlos had seen that look once, when they'd thought Pooch had been executed in Afghanistan and the two of them had started shooting more for vengeance than justice.
> 
> Oh God, Jake couldn’t _hear_ him! Damn it, all this time, he’d thought Jensen was doing his usual thing, but _he hadn’t heard him!_ Carlos hefted his rifle on instinct, letting out a yell as the butt of it slammed into his right shoulder, and started trying to clear a path for his friend—wherever the hell Jake thought he was going.
> 
> To Hell proved pretty accurate, and Carlos let out his own yell of frustration and grief as Jake’s head snapped back and he fell like a stone—

“Cougar, chill!”

A single hand held him down on a bed too soft to be in a hospital. Carlos looked up to see Pooch leaning over him. Jake had been screaming…

“Jensen?” he asked briefly. He pushed against Pooch’s arm with his good one and glared until the other man threw up his hands and let him sit. They were in a bedroom—a safehouse bedroom? The decor was Caribbean and the window looked out onto an anonymous beach, sprayed in the reds of either dawn or sunset. His right arm was strapped in a sling and pounded in time to his pulse.

“He’s alive,” Pooch replied. That wasn’t good enough. Jake had been _screaming_. “He’s more beat up than you, but he’ll survive. They think….” He watched Pooch brace himself to speak and his mind thought up a million reasons for that scream. “They _hope_ his head’ll be okay.” _His head?_ “Max had electrodes to his skull.”

A short explanation. Brutal, scared, and a little too hopeless sounding for Carlos’s taste. He stood up slowly enough not to fall back down again when his head wanted to split open. _“Max had electrodes to his skull.”_

“Where?”

Pooch wasn’t stupid enough to argue. “Next door. Look, Cougar… We got problems.”

Carlos almost laughed at that. “This is new?”

A reluctant smile broke out on Pooch’s face as he hooked Carlos’s good arm over his shoulder so he could drag him down the hall. “These problems? Yeah. Definitely new.”

He explained everything that had happened in Brazil and how they’d been evaced to Antigua by the mystery man who knew Jake. Calavicci would only say that he was there to help and he needed to talk to Jake before he could tell them anything. Stegler had disappeared with his team when they'd landed in Paramaribo, Suriname, to refuel, but had sent a sparse report to Clay stating that Admiral Albert Calavicci had been on loan to a civilian top secret project for ten years now, until the project was summarily cut and closed and locked away a few months ago.

Before he passed out, Jake had been talking garbled and crazy, his words confused and childlike and broken. He hadn’t woken yet from the minor surgery with minimal anesthetic—hadn’t even stirred as his belly wound and leg and scalp were sewn up. He’d lost blood, but not as much as Carlos had. Mostly, the medic worried, his brain was just too fried to make sense of consciousness. By the time Carlos was seated in the chair beside Jake’s bed, he was fighting not to be as discouraged as Pooch.

“The medic the CIA keeps for the safehouse fronts as a local doctor,” Pooch told him. “She’ll be back in the morning to check you both out, but she left instructions and shit.” He put a hand on Carlos’s left shoulder and squeezed. “I’ll get you something to eat and she said you should drink a ton—you know, the normal crap for blood loss.” He gestured across the room, but Carlos barely noticed. “There’s a couch.” Pooch snorted sadly, and that did catch Carlos’s attention. He looked up and suddenly realized how exhausted his friend looked. “Ain’t comfortable, but it’ll do.”

Carlos didn’t ask how long he’d been asleep. Too long, obviously. “Thanks,” he said simply. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”

That got him a laugh, but it was cold and brittle. Pooch was on the edge. “You’ll be lucky if you don’t fall asleep in the damn chair before I’m back with your food.”

Carlos nodded in agreement. “Probably."

Pooch squeezed his shoulder in understanding. “Yeah. I’ll be back.”

The door closed behind him and Carlos looked at Jake for a moment, sleeping still and peaceful under a patchwork quilt, an IV snaking out of the covers to make its way to the bag of fluids that hung incongruously beside the bed. The bullet Carlos thought had taken Jake’s life must have glanced off and the area was covered by a small white bandage that did nothing to hide the surrounding bruise. There was gel in Jake’s hair on both sides—for the burns, the electrodes, he guessed—but at least they hadn’t shaved his head. They’d never hear the end of it if _that_ happened.

If they ever heard anything at all.

God, if Carlos had only been able to make it down from his nest, he could have stopped everything that came after. He’d collapsed before he’d even gotten to the stairs and by the time he’d come back to his senses, it had all been over and he’d been bleeding long enough to compromise himself.

He’d been useless.

“Lo siento,” he murmured, leaning back and trying not to scream at the pain in his arm. Apologies meant nothing, he was well aware, but he couldn’t help but give one. He closed his eyes and listened to Jensen breathe. “Lo siento.”

*********

“Coug’s up,” Pooch’s quiet announcement as he walked into the kitchen startled Clay out of his thoughts. He'd just come back from giving Calavicci his dinner, and the old guy was being almost too cooperative in all this. It was making Clay’s teeth itch. The safehouse had a secure room with a digital lock on the steel door and bulletproof windows that couldn’t be opened. They’d stripped Calavicci of anything he could use to escape anyway and left him in there with a remote control for the television he didn’t seem to have turned on yet. Clay or Pooch had brought him meals when they were due. He was polite and asked after Cougar and Jensen. But mostly he sat, like he’d done this before. Like it was nothing. Or like he was content to wait to do what he came for and see Jensen.

_God, I wish I knew what the hell was going on!_

“He’s in J’s room,” Pooch continued with a half-hearted grin as Clay turned away from the sunset to face him. “Big surprise.” He started slapping together a sandwich. “Figure I’ll end up eating this. He was half asleep before I even left.”

“He okay?” Clay asked. Cougar had been sort of awake for the first leg of their trip, but Clay doubted he remembered even landing in Paramaribo. Once they got to Antigua, the medic had sewn Cougar up first and left him to sleep it off while she dealt with Jensen. Which he’d been doing for fifteen hours now. The medic had come in to check on them both about an hour ago and had been unsurprised to see Cougar still sleeping and outright concerned to see Jake doing the same.

“No,” Pooch said coldly. “He’s hurting. Worried. Confused. All the shit we are.” He took a deep breath. “But he’s here.”

Clay nodded. It was more than they had at dawn yesterday, when they burst into that clearing and started looking for their own among the dead.

“How’s J’s spaceman?” Pooch asked, grabbing a glass and filling it with water.

“I get the feeling he’s waited for interrogations in places crappier than this,” Clay responded with a grim smile. “The guy seems pretty wholesome. He’s a good actor, if nothing else.”

Pooch nodded. “What are we gonna do with him if Jensen isn’t making more sense when he wakes up?”

Clay didn't want to think about that. “Jensen’ll be okay.”

Pooch slammed the glass down almost hard enough to crack it. “Damn it, Clay, he hasn't been okay for months and you know it.” He took a deep breath, pushing words out when they obviously didn’t want to come. “I think whatever Max did to him... Maybe it finally pushed him over the edge.”

“He was barely awake, Pooch,” Clay said quietly, trying to calm him down. Pooch was the one on the edge right now. He’d just had too much of this crap that was their lives now. “You heard the medic. Electroshock causes massive confusion, right? He needs time to recover—”

“No, you didn’t see him, man.” Pooch ran a hand over his scalp and pulled it back, looking at it like he expected something to be there. “It’s like he thinks he’s somewhere else. Like something happened only he remembers and he can’t figure out what’s real and what’s not.” He stared at the sandwich. “Might not be any bringing him back from this one, boss.”

No. No, Clay didn’t believe that. Max was dead now—the sword hanging over their heads was gone. Jensen just needed to recover, get his head on straight. His brain didn’t have to be permanently scrambled… A bolt of fear ran straight down his back as his mind conjured up a view of Jensen’s crazy eyes in that room.

He hadn’t destroyed the kid’s life with one fuck up. Right?

“I’m gonna see if Coug’s awake to eat this.” Pooch’s voice held condemnation that Clay didn’t even try to dispute. “And then I’m going out.”

Clay didn’t move when he heard the door to Jake’s room open. Or when it closed. Or when the front door slammed with a bitter thud.

*********

Jake woke up feeling like he was going to come apart at the seams. And from the feel of things, he had a lot more seams to come apart at. The room was dim but not quite dark and his head was buzzing.

He remembered Pooch shooting Max and saying something about Stegler getting there and an astronaut asking him questions and then it was all a blur until now. He couldn’t really move (though he supposed he didn’t really want to) and his brain felt like the jelly you were left with after a two-, three-, or four-day bender. There was someone snoring nearby, though, so he took a deep breath and steeled himself, turning his head painfully to find Cougar snoozing in the chair next to him.

Cougar, who was dead and dust in the Gulf of Oman and also at the base of a two-story building in Brazil but _also_ alive and sprawled there with his arm in a sling, looking injured and worried even in his sleep, and exactly how many different realities was Jake supposed to deal with, anyway? Weren’t HERE and THERE enough? Was he supposed to grok SOMEPLACE ELSE now, too? He groaned at the prospect.

Of course, Cougar snapped awake at the sound. He hissed in pain and leaned forward very carefully, showing off a thick wad of bandages that crisscrossed his chest under his shirt, and grinned a tiny grin. “You’re awake.”

“You’re alive,” Jake countered. It was actually a question, but he managed not to make it sound like too much of one. His voice sounded a little slurred and indistinct to him and he hoped it was his ears, because he sounded like he was still on that damn bender. Or like Wilson’s car battery had melted his brain, which hurt to think about. “You—" Which one just happened? "You fell off a building.” That was it, right?

“My hat did,” Cougar replied, so even if Jake’s voice sounded like marble-talk, at least Coug could understand him. But it looked like it must hurt to listen to, so maybe Jake wouldn’t talk so much. “One of them got behind me and it seemed like a good idea to let Aisha think he’d succeeded.” He shrugged and hissed again at the stupid move. “I tried to tell you, but your comm was fried.”

Jake had a sudden image of himself doing almost exactly the same thing. Roque had been firing at him, and he’d thrown a dead guy into the sea so that asshole would think _he_ was dead… Cougar had too—they all had. Coug had hugged the shit out of him when he found out Jake was alive. A few days ago, he’d’ve said that happened THERE, but THERE and HERE seemed to be the same place now, so…

“I’d hug you, but I’m pretty sure I’m not up to that.”

Cougar’s face darkened. Oops. He wasn’t supposed to talk so much. “No, you’re not,” he agreed.

“Where's everyone?” Because there were more than there should be. Pooch. Pooch lived. Pooch always lived. And Jake remembered Clay being there after his brain was defragged, but Clay was dead. And then there was Stegler and the astronaut and a kid who looked like he was gonna throw up... “Where are we?”

“Antigua,” Cougar replied, which was so damn funny, Jake couldn’t help but laugh. That seemed to make Cougar nervous, so Jake explained himself because he no longer cared that nothing he said could really _be_ explained anymore.

“I always end up in Antigua. Whether the rest of you are dead or alive, Antigua.” It was _funny_. It was so fucking hilarious that he knew things that hadn’t happened and knew them so well that he was sure they had. There was nothing keeping THERE in the realm of dream and intuition anymore, it was just in his head. All of it. He could remember everything from Afghanistan to the Ukraine to the Gulf to Antigua—and Bolivia, Miami, LA, Venezuela, and Mexico besides.

“Jake?” Cougar asked worriedly. Jake tried to pull himself together. He was scaring Cougar, who was dead and not.

“Like Schrodinger’s cat,” Jake tittered, setting off the laughter again, no matter how hard he tried to stop it coming, no matter how much it _hurt_. “Oh man, and your nickname’s _Cougar_!” It was really, really funny!

“Cougar, what the hell is…” Clay’s voice cut off, and Jake watched him walk in the door like he was facing off with a tiger. Jake’s anger welled up to replace the laughter in an instant, flaring full-blown and deadly. If he’d been up to it, he kind of thought he might go after Clay, because he remembered thinking he should and his anger demanded it. He knew _his_ anger didn’t do that, but apparently that was different now, too.

“I killed your girlfriend,” he grated brutally. Cougar stiffened in his chair and Clay sucked in a breath right in front of him. _They_ knew his anger didn’t do that, too, and he sounded a little evil-twiny, even to himself. “She was exactly the bitch I told you she was and you were stupid to split up the team and… I told you so.” That last part, though? Didn’t sound twelve years old at all. Nope.

Clay’s face was impassive again. “I know. We found her body at the compound.” He came forward to stand at the end of the bed. “I’m sorry, Kid,” he murmured, meeting Jake’s eyes with that complete candidness that made him such a trustworthy CO. And really damn hard to hold a grudge against. “I should have gone with my first instinct and kept us all together.”

He'd managed to die in the damn firebomb without splitting them up, but yes, yes he should have fucking gone with it. There was no reason to rub it in, though, right?

“At least she didn’t blow you up this time,” Jake replied tamely, seeing Clay’s confused look and ignoring it. It was a batshit-crazy thing—Clay wouldn’t understand.

“Right,” Clay said carefully. “Listen, I’m gonna get the medic in here to take another look at you now that you’re awake. Max worked you over pretty good.”

“Not Max,” Jake corrected with an exhausted sigh, wishing someone would turn on a light, as the sun’s memory kept fading outside the window. Night time already. How long had he been out? He should ask. His brain really wasn’t working right, was it? “My buddy Wilson did it. Like the ball in that _Castaway_ movie. Except, you know, an actual live person.” He looked at Cougar, nodding his thanks when his friend read his mind and flicked on the bedside light. “Wilson’s dead, right? Pooch got him?”

“It's not like we got a detailed list of bad guys, Kid,” Clay told him. He and Cougar thought Jake was nuts, clearly, but since he was thinking the same thing, Jake just went with it.

“Bald, short, long black beard.” He could see it didn’t ring a bell for either of them. He shrugged, which hurt a lot, but the fact that he could do it meant maybe he wasn’t as far gone as he thought he was. Which was good, because if Wilson was still alive, Jake had plans. “I guess if I’m lucky, he got away so I can hunt him down myself.” He knew he sounded completely and utterly bloodthirsty for a second there and more like that bitch Aisha than himself and he really didn’t care.

Clay sort of looked like he wanted to throw up for a second before he nodded and left—to call the medic or whatever. “Cush job, huh?” Jake asked, for something to say. “A medic in Antigua?” He looked around and his eyes fell on a sandwich on the table next to the bed. He was hungry, sort of. “You’re not eating that, right?” he asked. But then he took a good look at Cougar and saw that he was whiter than Jake was himself, which wasn’t okay, and he might actually fall out of the chair soon. Also not okay. “On second thought, eat something. You look crappy.”

Cougar just stared at him, all sad and concerned, and Jake decided maybe he wasn’t hungry after all and maybe he shouldn’t have woken up anyway, since it seemed like, yep, he was still crazy. He closed his eyes and went away—he wasn’t sleeping, really, but he didn’t want to bother with thinking or being, at least until the medic came. Dead or alive, Cougar was his best friend and let him.

***********  
to be continued…


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because I loves my readers, a bonus chapter. A very long, very Jake-be-crazy chapter. You've been warned.

Jolene had a saying: “Being mad only wastes your energy and theirs.” Pooch’s wife—and God, someday she was going to get to _be_ his wife again, right?—was one brilliant lady, and as he walked down the moonlit beach toward the safehouse, Pooch tried to let it all go.

Clay was beating himself up over this bad enough—Pooch’s anger was only making that worse, and it sure wasn’t making _him_ feel any better. As pissed as he was at Clay for fucking up, he was so much more pissed at Max, who was dust already. Hell, he wasn’t even dust, he was, like, imploded atoms. There were better things to spend your energy on.

Except that, every time Pooch thought of damn near anything right now, an image of Jake’s batshit eyes and uncoordinated movements came to mind. Max had done that. He’d broken a guy who hadn’t been broken by any of the myriad shit he’d been through in a surprisingly shitty life.

> Their first mission after Jake was nearly killed by his asshole brother-in-law was a quick retrieve-and-destroy in southern Somalia. They’d found out what happened to Jake’s parents back in the beginning, when they’d been a team for less than a year. But now, two years together, he’d let slip the story of how his dad had held a knife to his then-eight-year-old sister’s throat, and they found out they’d never known exactly how fucked his family really was. The reality of it—of how a kid who grew up like Jake had became the fun-loving, painfully optimistic guy Jake was—poked at Pooch.
> 
> Pooch had three brothers who’d kill for each other, a sister they’d all spent their lives doting on, and parents who were still madly in love 50 years after they met. Families like Jake’s made his head hurt. So when he and Jake were holed up in a bunker south of Kismayo, waiting for the cover of darkness to get the hell back to the rendezvous point, he kind of had to ask when an opportunity came up to find out more about his amiable buddy.
> 
> Admittedly, Jake brought it on himself. He was trying to bed down for the night, sleepily scratching at the still-healing knife scar left by his aforementioned asshole brother-in-law and griping about it ruining his “ripped physique.” In fact, it was pretty small, compared to some of the other scars he sported. One of which was a long razor-thin line from his left shoulder to his left hip. It looked old. Very old. Little kid old.
> 
> “What are you whining about,” Pooch had asked, knowing he was probably going to get one of Jake’s blank-stare-and-blithe-replies. Stock in trade for a man who refused to say anything he didn’t have to about his life before age sixteen. “Can’t be worse than that slice down your side. What’d you do, fall out of a tree?”
> 
> Jake was exhausted. They’d been on the run for hours before they’d found this place, they’d both been slammed into a wall by the first explosion (and Pooch’s head was still ringing from that)—hell, they hadn’t even known whether Roque and Clay were still alive at that point. Jake’s shields were down and he slipped.
> 
> “Learned not to get ice cream on my shirt. Mom always hated a mess.”
> 
> Pooch had frozen as Jake sighed deeply and, by all accounts, dropped right off to sleep. That was a fucking knife wound. God, had his mom _cut off his fucking shirt?_ It was pretty much the last time Pooch tried to solicit information about Jake’s family. He just didn’t want to know, and neither did Jake.

He shook himself from the memory and looked through the kitchen window to see a single light on and no one there. He slid onto one of the beach chairs and sat in the near-darkness, brooding. Pooch had had a dream, before he’d put a bullet in Max’s skull—before Max had put electrodes to Jake’s. They’d take Max down, get their lives back, be fucking normal again. Stateside jobs, weekend get togethers, barbeques at his place with Jake’s niece there to babysit Jerome…

Now, even if Stegler did clear their names, they’d never be whole. Jake’d… Hell, he didn’t know what was going to happen to Jake. It wasn’t going to be pretty, no matter what it was, unless he magically snapped out of this. Pooch wanted to believe that the medic was right and Jake was just whacked from the electrocution. That he’d get better.

But he’d been slipping even before that. Since Bolivia, which was fucking Max’s fault, too.

Pooch turned in his chair as the light in the kitchen got brighter. Clay had flicked on the overhead lamp and was headed for the phone. He looked haunted, and Pooch almost stood to go inside and find out what was going on. Almost. Instead he just sat and watched as his CO spoke to someone, hung up, and poured himself a hefty drink. When Clay turned to the door that lead out to the patio, Pooch bolted silently, headed for the front of the house.

He wasn’t saying Jolene was wrong about wasting energy, he just wasn’t ready to stop being pissed.

He let himself in the front door of the safehouse, listening to the silence he was so damn sick of, the silence that had drive him from the building in the first place. Cougar had been asleep when he’d gone back into Jake’s room, just like he thought, so he’d left the sandwich and gotten the hell out. A hard run down the beach followed by what was supposed to be a soothing look under the hood of that ancient Huey had gotten out some of his frustration.

He fingered the PDA he’d found attached to the steering column and comm unit of the old bird, unsurprised that he hadn’t noticed it through the whole damn process of getting here. They’d all been a mess, but maybe it was time to start pulling it together. Like Bolivia—they’d had their chance to be in shock, but they still had to figure out what to do next.

That started with J and his spaceman. And probably, this little PDA. Making a quick decision all on his own, he walked silently down the hall to the secure room and keyed open the lock.

Calavicci was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. He sat up quickly enough, but didn’t seem to be expecting much as he looked at Pooch expectantly. Sure did start salivating when Pooch pulled out that sleek black toy of his, though.

“I want to know what the hell is going on with you,” Pooch said quietly. “What’s your game?”

“No game, Sergeant Porteous,” the admiral assured him, reluctantly looking away from the PDA. “I just need to talk to Jensen and then I’ll be out of your hair.” He looked hopeful and worried in a way that confused Pooch all over again. “Is he awake?”

Pooch realized that, given Clay’s actions in the kitchen, he didn’t actually know the answer to that. “Why are you so crazy to talk to him?” he tried, wincing a little at his own word choice. He slipped the PDA back in his pocket, noting the tightening of the old guy’s face. Was damned important, whatever it was.

“I’m hoping he can help me,” Calavicci said candidly. “And maybe I can help him.”

Pooch sighed at that. J couldn’t help anyone right now. Calavicci saw the weakness and ran with it. “Jensen’s been having problems before this, huh?”

“What do you know about it?” God, this whole thing made Pooch’s stomach twist.

Calavicci smiled sadly. “More than I want to, believe me.”

Fucking riddles. “Man, you’re gonna have to give me a good reason not to blow you away, all right?” He didn’t let his hand stray to the pistol in a holster at his back. “Because right now, I’m of a mind to do it.”

Calavicci nodded, seeming to come to a decision. “Does Jensen remember things that never happened?” Pooch’s palms started sweating. “Maybe he knows things are going to happen before they do—or knows a person he’s never met?”

Pooch’s fingers wrapped around that gun but he didn’t draw it as he stepped forward.

“God damn it, buddy—”

A soft knock on the front door had him pulling the gun and cocking it as he exchanged a glance with Calavicci. “You stay the fuck here. Try anything, I’ll kill you.” He wished his heart was more in that threat, but something about the man’s earnest concern was getting to him.

He slid out the door, closing and locking it before heading to the front of the house. Clay made it there before him, gun out, but stowed his firearm once he’d looked through the spyhole.

“Medic’s here,” Clay said quietly, opening the front door and gestured for the pretty lieutenant to come in. “Jensen’s finally awake.” He sniffed. “Sort of.”

Pooch reholstered his own gun. “Maybe now we can finally start getting some answers.” He looked back down the hall and felt Clay watching him.

“Why don’t you give the lieutenant a few minutes and bring Calavicci in,” Clay replied. “We’ll get the ball rolling if we can.”

He didn’t have to explain that last. _If Jake was sane enough to do it._

Pooch nodded and headed to the kitchen first. If he was going to have to deal with this, he needed a drink.

*******

The medic, Lieutenant Bryant—not the kid that had been trying not to throw up back in Brazil, but an older blonde dressed in civvies, who was kind of dangerously hot—came in finally and asked annoying questions that Jake really did try to get right. But a simple question like “do you know what happened,” was a monumental undertaking because, yes, he knew what happened. He knew what happened both times that it happened and saying that was just going to get him a one-way ticket to Crazyville.

She got him propped up in his bed and confirmed that, yes, he could move his fingers and toes, and yes, he knew his own name and Cougar’s and Clay’s besides, and yes, everything hurt a whole hell of a lot. The painkillers she gave him took the edge off almost immediately, and he considered kissing her for that, but his mouth still wasn’t working so well. She said that could be because he’d pulled a muscle or three trying not to scream while Wilson had done his business—or when he _gave up_ trying not to scream, which was more likely. It probably wasn’t because his brain was fried, so that was nice to hear.

“All in all, I think you’re doing all right, Captain Jensen,” she said finally. “I’m obviously concerned about the confusion, but I believe some of that will likely clear up as you get to feeling better.”

Jake couldn’t stop himself from laughing at that—he couldn’t seem to stop himself from doing anything. No impulse control at all! Well, torture could do that to you. “I think you might be overly optimistic.”

“Maybe,” she allowed. “But you’ve been through a lot. Give yourself some time.” She didn’t seem bothered by the crazy and that made him want to kiss her again. It also made him think of Aisha—which made him wonder if Lieutenant Bryant was going to knife him when he wasn’t looking.

“We’re done here, right?” he asked nervously. She should really leave. And he should really have a gun handy, just in case.

> _The sun was setting, which seemed the perfect time. The gun in his hand was Cougar’s, which was fitting, too._
> 
> _“I kill you, you kill me, right?” he joked to the waves as they lapped toward him._
> 
> _He felt nothing as he raised the barrel—_

“...eat something and make sure he takes his pain pills.” Lieutenant Bryant. She was talking to Clay and Jake wasn’t sure if she was talking about him or Cougar, because Coug sure as hell looked like he needed some pain pills. He just sat there, staring. Without a hat, which was weird.

> _He handed Cougar his hat and watched him straighten it as blood dripped down his face and his chest and his legs… Holes everywhere…  
>  _
> 
> _“Rock,” Cougar whispered, his voice wet with the blood in his lungs._

Cougar shifted in his seat. Alive and atomic fish food at the same time. _Wow,_ Jake thought blankly, _I really am just bugfucked, huh?_

Time skipped and he let it and she was gone and Clay and Cougar were staring at him. He should talk.

“So, Stegler came through, huh?” Propped up, he could see the room better. It was a beach house bedroom, all pastels and cheap furniture. Clay hadn’t gotten any sleep and Cougar looked like shit and both of them had been dead the last time Jake had been in a beach house in Antigua.

“As much as he could,” Clay allowed warily. His face went sour. “Spy world is going fucking nuts while they figure out who to point the finger at without destroying the whole Agency. He _claims_ he’ll do what he can, but for now we’re still dead. At least until all the rats from Max’s sinking ship can be rounded up.”

“That should only take until Pooch’s kids—kid—is in college.” He looked around. “Where is Pooch?” Pooch lived, right? Pooch always lived. He should be here.

“He’s keeping an eye on a friend of yours—” Clay broke off as the door opened and Pooch and a short sixty-something-year-old man who’d been sleeping in his clothes walked in. He seemed vaguely familiar, but from neither HERE nor THERE. Jake was intrigued.

“J! Hey, man, good to see you awake,” Pooch said happily. If there was a touch of wariness there too, it wasn't like Jake could call him on it.

The mystery man stayed back and studied him, eyes soft with inexplicable compassion. Something clicked in Jake's admittedly really sore and aching brain, and he put his hands on the bandages on either side of his head to try to contain his buzzing skull. Why did thinking hurt so bad if he wasn’t fried? Whatever. It did. He'd met the guy before, at least once.

"What’s with the astronaut?" Was he the astronaut who'd been asking questions? Jake kind of thought he might be. His hands dropped back to his sides—they weren’t helping anyway. “Sixty-four thousand dollar question, buddy," Pooch replied, though he looked a little less suspicious than he sounded. "Showed up about the time Stegler did. Claims to want to help."

"Help with what?" Jake didn't see that one old astronaut was gonna be a lot of help. Sure did look familiar though—and not just from his trading card. "Calavicci." His brain came up with a grainy picture of this guy and two others. "You were one of the post-Apollo astronauts, right?" God, his brain was moving so slowly and his jaw made that really hard to say. "Skylab... Five?"

Clay stepped forward. "Fine we get it, he’s an astronaut. But do you _know_ him, Jensen?" _Because I'll probably kill him if you don't,_ went unspoken.

Jake looked the man over and still couldn’t place him other than that astronaut thing. “Nope." But then again.... "Don't you have a girlfriend named Ziggy?"

The Admiral smirked, though from the relief on his face, he'd recognized the threat in Clay's tone as clearly as Jake had. "Sort of, Kid," he affirmed. "Think she's more partial to you, though."

Huh. Jake's eyes closed on their own. Nobody's girlfriend liked him better—not even his own girlfriends. "She's a computer."

He opened his eyes at the deafening silence. Clay and Pooch were pissed because they didn't understand what the hell was going on—seriously, join the party—and Cougar looked like he wanted to hit something to make himself feel better—ditto there. But Calavicci looked shocked. And kind of happy.

"You really remember her?" Calavicci asked.

Jake shook his head. He didn't. He just knew what he knew, like everything else.

"All right, pal. You’re here, he’s awake and talking. Now explain to me what the hell is going on before I shoot you out of pure irritation," Pooch growled. Clay was clearly going to have to get in line to kill the Admiral.

Calavicci took a deep breath that looked damn familiar, _like he was making a decision he rarely made._ "In 1998, Captain Jensen was part of a secret government experiment called Project Quantum Leap."

"And what part of 1998 would that be?" Clay asked coldly. "Because he was only with us for 365 days that year."

Except that he wasn't. Jake stared at the Admiral— _the Admiral_ —and held his breath for a long second, letting it out silently as something else in his head exploded. _Oh God…_

_"Look, whatever the hell Ziggy is, she’s amazing. And terrifying, and I don’t know what the hell you people were thinking when you created her or this project.”_

"The project dealt with time travel," Calavicci was saying, his voice fading in and out as Jake remembered.

_"I mean, you do get how dangerous the whole idea of this is, right? You watched all the good scifi?”_

"Okay, now I know you're shitting us," Pooch was snarling. "How do you expect us to believe that crap?"

Jake's ears started to ring. _“Am I still in the corps in 2002?”_

"After what I saw yesterday? Come on—that imploding bomb was just as hard to swallow," Calavicci replied. "But there's a crater in the Amazon that says different."

_“Hell, am I even alive in 2002?”_

"I don't know what the hell your game is, old man, but you suck at cover stories." Clay still sounded ready to kill him.

Without looking, Jake reached over to the side table for the glass of water Cougar had left there. He didn't move to drink it, just cradled it awkwardly in his swollen hands, resting the cool base of it on the bandages that wound around his stomach. Things were unraveling out of a place in his mind that had been spared the initial burst of electricity from Wilson’s battery and it fucking hurt...

"Look, whether you believe me or not," the Admiral was saying, "I'm here to help. Just give me a chance to talk to the kid."

_"You really could destroy the world from here.”_

_“Or save it.”_

“You honestly think we’re leaving you here with him, in the shape he’s in—”

Clay’s threat was stopped cold as Jake raised an arm and, again without looking because he honestly didn’t give a shit if he hit someone, flung the glass with all his might. It shattered against the far wall with a satisfying gunshot sound and Jake continued to stare at the hand still in his lap for a few seconds to make sure the rest of them were going to shut the hell up.

He remembered everything—Rahkim, the Admiral, Ziggy, the blue room, everything. And he was more pissed off than he’d ever been in his entire fucking life.

“Could everybody just get out?" he grated wearily, lifting his splitting skull enough to stare at Calavicci. “Except you.”

“Jensen, there is no way—” Clay began, only to stop at the cold look Jake knew was in his eyes.

“Clay, man, as you like to point out, you are not my CO anymore, and I swear…” He swallowed—what the hell threat could he really make, lying in this bed, barely moving? Barely thinking? “Ten minutes, guys,” he whispered. “Please?” He just couldn’t process with so many people in the room.

Clay glared at Calavicci before turning back to Jake, looking worried and guilty and pissed. Pooch put a hand on his shoulder, though, and Cougar stood up slowly, shuffling over to stand behind him, the three of them presenting a united front as they watched Calavicci watching Jake. Jake smiled his thanks to Pooch as he all but shoved Clay toward the door.

“Ten minutes, Jensen,” Clay agreed, making it sound like the most dire warning. Which Jake knew it was.

The door closed, and Calavicci took Cougar’s seat carefully and waited for Jake to start talking. Seemed like he was more afraid of Jake himself than the three very scary men who’d just left.

Only Jake wasn’t sure what to say. This guy… this guy and his project had changed history. They’d changed history and they hadn’t even had the decency to make sure Jake changed with it. Now that he remembered everything— _fucking everything_ —it was so completely clear: stopping Rakhim had sent Fadhil running off to Central America and delayed his falling out with Max and a million other things had changed and still Jake had two different sets of dead kids in his head and this asshole Admiral and his people didn’t even think to fucking _fix it_.

Who _does_ that to someone?!

“Project Quantum Leap, huh?” he said finally, voice cold and flat. “I never did find out what it was called.”

Calavicci nodded, trying to seem apologetic. “Yeah. Look, kid, I know the things you're remembering—”

Jake almost choked. "Well, see, here’s the thing, _Admiral_. What I’m _remembering_ is that half the oil fields in the Middle East glow—from the nuke Coug set off, not from the oil. Pooch pretty much resigned himself to watching his daughters grow up from 3000 miles away, whenever I could hack into the security cameras all around his hometown. I haven't seen a powderpuff soccer game in three years. My colonel, who's gonna come in here and kick your ass if we’re not done in about five minutes, is nuclear-powered bugdust THERE, by the way. And so is my best friend—who I left to die so I could save my own skin." He really was going to throw up.

"I'm so damn sorry, kid—"

“What do you want?” Jake asked bluntly, angry enough that maybe he shouldn’t have been left alone with this guy. “It’s not to help. Nobody hunts down a dead man to 'help'. Especially a dead man they screwed over as completely as you did me.” He refused to look up. “Or did you know I was alive? That we were alive? Your time-hopping buddy tell you that?”

The Admiral sighed at Jake’s anger and Jake made the fatal error of looking at him. There was something sad and despairing in his eyes. Something needy to go with the sympathy. So, yeah, not here to help. He wanted something, just like everybody else.

“I didn’t know you were alive until a couple of weeks ago, kid, I swear,” the Admiral said. “Once they shut the project down, Ziggy started—”

“They finally got smart, huh?” Jake interrupted. “About time someone figured out how fucked up that whole thing was.” He remembered now that second of utter horror when he’d realized, way back when he’d been switched with “Sam”, how completely the project could change—obviously _had changed_ —the world. He looked around, like that guy with the white streak in his hair was going to suddenly pop out of the closet. Man, his brain really _was_ fried. “Where’s your pal? Off trying to figure out how to screw up somebody else’s life?”

Calavicci looked absolutely stricken for a second before he got mad. “Kid, I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt after what you’ve been through, but Sam saved a hell of a lot of lives,” he growled, pointing at Jake. “Yours included—”

“Except he didn’t, did he?” Jake cut in, voice so cold that Calavicci froze with it. “He didn’t and he was never going to. He—and you—might have delayed the _actual_ slaughter for a few years, but I got those years to wake up in a cold sweat, time after time, remembering what it was like to see all those kids die and Cougar lose his mind and our lives go to utter shit, and _then_ —” he took a deep breath that shoved daggers into the knife wound in his belly and brought tears to his eyes— “ _Then_ I got to do it all over again for real! Do you do this to everyone? Are there, like, a bunch of people out there, living both lives because you couldn’t stop fucking with shit you shouldn’t fuck with?”

The Admiral fell back in his chair and Jake should have felt a little sorry for him, but didn’t. He totally didn’t. “No. There’s nobody else,” Calavicci whispered. “God, Kid, we didn’t even know it would happen to you. We hoped—”

“ _You hoped?!_ ” Jake knew he was actually crying at this point and he didn’t care. Jesus, where was a gun when you needed it? And just two seconds ago he was pitying the guy! “You fucking _hoped_ this would happen!?”

Calavicci held up his hands in defense. “No, no, not like that.” He took a deep breath and Jake watched him try to hold it together. Well, good. He didn’t want to be the only person barely hanging on.

“Look, Sam’s… My connection to Sam? The way I knew what he was doing? It’s neurological. Brain patterns, mesons, neurons, that sort of thing.” He got a pleading look on his face. “You’re the only near match to my pattern Sam ever leaped into. Ziggy thinks he imprinted on you.”

“What is he, a dog?” Jake wasn’t going to give in to the part of his mind that wanted to listen to what this guy had to say. He was going to stick with being violently pissed off and wait until he had a gun and blow the fucker to pieces. He didn’t have much left, now that the world was a jumble of crap and crap and more soul-crushing crap, but he had his anger and he was keeping it.

Hell, maybe his parents weren’t so far off—smacking this guy around sure would make him feel better right about now. The idea would have horrified him yesterday, but with all the pain and blood running through his mind, it seemed perfectly reasonable.

Wow, his brain really wasn't working right, was it?

“He's a hell of a lot more than that,” Calavicci whispered, obviously seeing Jake’s resolve and caving to it.

Jake closed his eyes as that new-found resolve went right out the fucking window at the sheer pain in the Admiral’s voice. Something almost sane brought him back from wanting to pummel the old man and he sighed. Stupid fried brain. “He’s dead?”

“No.” The quick, desperate response told Jake what he wanted to know. “No. But he’s missing.”

Jake nodded and opened his eyes to stare at the old man. He was so damn tired. “So what am I supposed to do about it?”

“Ziggy thinks Sam’s… stuck. In the place you call THERE.” The Admiral ran his hands through his hair. “We lost him months ago, but if you’ve been remembering both timelines the whole time, then… Then maybe you can help find him. If we can get you to the Project—”

“I thought they shut down your precious project,” Jake interrupted.

“They did,” Calavicci growled. "Damn Air Force is supposed to be decommissioning the place."

Jake snorted. "They probably haven't even started yet, then."

Calavicci smiled at the dig and Jake realized he'd offered an olive branch he hadn't meant to. Because he hadn't. He wasn't giving in to this old man who missed his best friend as much as Jake missed his. Because, yeah, Cougar was just outside the door, but he was also dead, dead, dead. There was no way Jake was giving in. He wasn't...

He laughed hopelessly. Who was he kidding? "See, here’s the part where I ask what the hell you could possibly do to convince me that the people who put two whole fucking timelines in my brain are people I want to help.” He was still angry as hell, but he was on the verge of passing out and the stupid-fried-brain part of him had already decided to help this guy, apparently. “What’s in it for me?”

“Damn it, kid, I don’t know,” Calavicci said, sounding old and worn-out and kind of pitifully desperate to Jake’s ears. “What do you want?”

Jake thought. “Seriously?” He wanted not to remember, but he was pretty sure that wasn't an option. “I want our lives back.”

The Admiral paused a minute. “I’m not sure that’s something I can do.” But Jake could tell that he was lying, or at least that Calavicci hoped he was lying.

“I don’t give a shit,” Jensen said quietly. “I want them back.” He did, suddenly almost desperate for it. He wanted memories of watching Pooch play with Jerome as the kiddo grew up, of his own sister and niece and soccer games, and real, fucking life. For months he’d tried to convince himself that he didn’t need what he couldn’t have, but, God, he needed this.

A long moment of silence stretched between them and Calavicci finally sighed. “Look, I’ll do the best I can.” He dropped his elbows to his knees and clasped his hands between them before raising his head. "I'm hoping, at the very least, I can help you deal with what's in your head."

Jake sucked in a breath to hold off the hope. He was in enough pain already. "You have some sort of magic machine at the Project that wipes memories?" he asked, trying to sound flippant. He was shaking now, though, and he knew it wasn’t just exhaustion.

The compassion in Calavicci's eyes suddenly made a little more sense as the Admiral grinned with infinite sadness. "Don't I wish."

He took a minute to center himself and when he spoke, he was fighting either anger or tears. “The first time Sam changed history, there were 13 separate memories that changed,” he said quietly. “ _My_ memories—stupid things: a test pilot record, the name of a sandwich at a deli I'd gone to on base... Second time it was a baseball stat I'd memorized. The third time, there were over 70.” He smiled bleakly. “I had a migraine for a week after that one, just trying to figure out what happened in which timeline.”

Jake nodded, suddenly glad he only had two timelines in his head. “How many times has your friend done this?”

“Before he disappeared, more than a hundred. Since? I'd give an awful lot to know.” He gave Jake a long, sad, _envious_ look that Jake wasn’t strong enough right now to interpret. Jesus. This guy had gone through this a hundred times?

“Why don’t I tell you what I remember, Jensen?” the old man said quietly, like he was too worn down to fight it anymore. “I remember a brilliant scientist—genius geek like yourself—who dragged a no-account drunk out of the gutter and convinced him to be a real soldier again.” His eyes were warm with memory. “A real man.” He pegged Jensen with a look that made the younger man uncomfortable. “And now he’s gone, and you are the only loser I know who might have a chance to bring him back.”

It must have been ten minutes on the dot, because right then the door opened and Clay strode in, Cougar and Pooch sliding in behind him. Totally broke the mood.

“Still problem free in here, Jensen?” Clay asked, clearly ready to blow the guy away if the answer was no.

Jake dropped his chin to his chest in defeat. “Yeah. Problem free.” _Well, at least until I try to explain this whole thing._

His brain sped up a little as he tried to figure out exactly _what_ to explain. They should probably start with the whole Project thing, but that was going to piss Clay off, so maybe not too much detail or they’d end up listening to the resident conspiracy theorist go on about the Kennedy assassination and government-funded time manipulation or something… It seemed like his mind suddenly found traction and was actually functioning, which was a good sign, right? He turned back to Calavicci, offering the second olive branch in ten minutes. "So, if the project is shut down, where's your girlfriend?"

The Admiral looked at Pooch with a relieved smile on his face. “Sergeant Porteous has her in his pocket.”

Jake chuckled at the joke, but his eyes lit up as Pooch pulled a little black PDA out of his actual pocket. “Shit, really?” He tried to make grabby fingers, annoyed when his fingers sort of grabbed and his hands twitched spastically. They would get better, right? Because if not, he was going to be like Lon Chaney for the rest of his life, and that was only useful on Halloween.

“Gimme,” he clarified, watching as Pooch ignored Calavicci’s permissive nod and gave the thing to Jake whether the old guy wanted him to or not, because, damn it, Jake wanted it! He turned it on, and the screen washed through pastel colors instead of giving him a standard interface. His brain twisted with memory.

“Hello, HAL,” he said quietly, the assonance causing his aching jaw problems.

“ _Good evening, Dave,_ ” Ziggy responded. The flirt.

“God damn, J, really?” Pooch muttered, disgusted. “You got yourself a computer girlfriend?”

Jake looked up to see the blatant relief on Pooch’s face and let him have his fun. “If you can’t pick one up, plug one in,” he replied. This thing really was sweet. “There’s no way she’s in here,” he said, running a hand over the device. “Her neural network…” The Admiral was watching him with a smile and sad eyes. “Where is she—the Project?”

“ _My neural network was uploaded into a backup server in the CERN facility when Project Quantum Leap was discontinued._ ”

“Uh, yeah,” Calavicci put in quietly. “CERN doesn’t actually know that.”

Jake giggled—and stopped dead when Clay and Pooch both froze up at the sound. Cougar didn’t, because Cougar knew that was exactly what Jake would have done before all this if he met a COMPUTER WHO COULD THINK. Jake gave his best friend a wink and cleared his throat.

“Okay, so…” This was going to be fun. Not. “Stuttgart, 1998…”

*************

Al quietly closed the door to his small, unnecessarily secure room and leaned against it as he heard Porteous engage the lock. He sniffed his amusement—it was hard to feel too confined in a Caribbean beach house when you'd survived five years in a North Vietnamese POW camp.

Cushy environs or not, he was exhausted. He and the kid—with help from Ziggy, whose flirting with Jensen made Porteous downright uncomfortable—had tried to explain to the rest of the Losers what had happened in ‘98, and while none of them believed it, they went ahead and trusted Jensen anyway. Al thought they had trusted each other for so long, they didn’t know what else to do now. He’d spent most of his time watching them as they listened.

Clay was beating himself up for putting Alvarez and Jensen in danger. Alvarez seemed to be brooding about the fact that Jensen had been remembering some truly horrific things (presumably because he hadn't shared them)—he was with Jensen now, too injured himself to be up for a bedside vigil and too good a friend not to do it anyway. Porteous was a rock and had steadfastly badgered the other two into shutting up and dealing because they were pissing Jensen off. He wasn't doing it because he believed it all, but because he was focusing on anything that made Jensen normal.

They were a hell of a team, all right.

Not surprisingly, Jensen hadn’t lasted long and Clay wasn’t willing to risk the kid’s recovery, so it was less than an hour after Clay burst in the door that Porteous was politely escorting Al back to the room he now occupied. When they got to the door, Porteous held out the handlink Jensen had been so reluctant to part with, then refused to let it go when Al reached for it.

“You’re shitting us, I’ll kill you,” Porteous said quietly, finally releasing the device. “You know that, right?”

Al had just nodded his head because, yeah, he knew that.

Now, he fingered the handlink and palmed it back on. “Hey Ziggy. Alone at last.”

" _I believe that went as well as could be expected,_ " she said, as wryly as a computer could. " _However, Captain Jensen seems..._ "

"Disjointed? Confused? Disoriented?" Al sighed, setting the handlink on the bedside table and sitting down on the edge of the bed to scrub at his face with his hands. Actually, the kid was surprisingly lucid for having in his head what he did. Al had been impressed, even a little jealous, to learn that, without coaching, therapy, or computer mediation, Jensen had been dealing with chunks of THERE almost from the beginning.

Not that it had been smooth sailing apparently, but the kid had managed three years in the field trying to fit memories into spaces where they couldn't fit. It was no surprise the edges had started to fray when history repeated itself and that helicopter went down in Bolivia.

They'd come completely apart now, though. Jensen would cruise along for two or three minutes, making sense and fully oriented, before suddenly veering off and mixing timelines. Often when he did, he'd just peter off and spend a silent moment trying to get himself back to the current reality. He was touchy as hell, too, and the way the others reacted told him that that was a new development.

As painful as it all was for Al to watch, it had to be absolute hell on Jensen's friends.

“I’m not sure how to help him,” he admitted. “I mean, he’s had the basic structure of the two timelines in his mind since ’98, but with the trauma of the electrocution, now it’s like…”

“ _Like Dr. Beckett’s first leaps?_ ” she asked.

Al nodded, though she couldn't see it. God, it had been so damn hard in the beginning to get a handle on what to remember and what to forget. He’d tried everything to keep track at first: writing lists of Before and After, telling someone—usually Verbena in her capacity as the project's shrink—all the little things that were different, reviewing Ziggy’s logs with an obsession that did nothing to help, aside from convince him that, yes, the world had changed and he was the only one to notice. “I tried all of Beeks’ tricks back then, but I don’t think they were what got me through it. How do I explain something I never even realized I was doing?”

“ _Dr. Beeks believes your facility for adjusting to the myriad changes in history brought about by Dr. Beckett’s interference was in part nurtured by your time as a POW in Vietnam._ ”

Al just stared at the handlink for a long moment before he lay back on the bed. “No kidding?” he murmured finally, staring through the ceiling into a jungle thirtysome years gone. Vietnam had definitely taught him to forget as needed. “I don't know how Jensen's been doing it, though,” he said, thankful that that kid hadn't had to live through something like that. “It’s sadly a learned skill, not a natural talent.”

“ _Actually,_ ” Ziggy corrected carefully, “ _there are certain files in the Saginaw, Michigan, sealed court records that might be beneficial. It’s possible his history is why Captain Jensen managed the dual timelines for as long as he did._ ”

Al sat back up, resigning himself to a sleepless night. God, if Ziggy was equating it to his own time in the hole, did he want to know what the kid’s life had been like before all this? “All right, Ziggy,” he said, taking hold of the handlink and wishing he’d built it with a bigger screen. “Let’s take a look.”

**********  
to be continued…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and others reference events that took place in a story of mine called Forget This, Too (available here at AO3). It's flagged as slash but if you blink you'll miss it. So you might could read it anyway, even if slash is not your thing :).


	11. Chapter 11

Carlos woke with a start and gave himself a minute to just stare at Jensen, living and breathing and here in front of him.

He had an almighty crick in his neck and a need for both coffee and painkillers. He hadn't meant to wake up in the damn chair—God knew his injuries didn't appreciate his inability to stay awake long enough to shuffle to the couch across the room. But he’d been staring at Jensen one minute and waking up in the exact same position hours later the next.

At least he had the chance to wake up at all. As disgusting as the thought of a second-hand bullet was, a cracked rib was better than the alternative. His right arm was a whole other story, though, and he couldn't move it at all, right this second. Not only had he bled too much, but the force of the hit had pulled the surrounding muscles all to hell.

 _Fuck it,_ he thought. It would all heal. He forced himself to wake up further and look around. Dawn was just breaking and Jensen was still asleep, so much less the worse for wear, at least physically speaking, than they all thought he'd be, given what they'd heard.

The scream Jake had let out when he was electrocuted lingered in Carlos’s mind and he wished he could use both hands to try to scrub the memory away. Instead he rubbed his left hand over his face and tried not to think about any of it.

So of course, none of it would leave him alone. Now that he was recovering, it was like his mind had to fill in the blanks it had left empty during his time awake last night. Last night, it had had too much else to worry about.

He didn't remember Clay hiding him while he went out to face down Stegler and Calavicci, and thank God he didn't remember the room where Jake had been tortured. He'd woken, sort of, strung between two strangers who were dragging him toward a helicopter. Normally, that would have had him fighting tooth and nail, but for two things: one, he could barely raise his head much less attack, and two, when he did lift his gaze, he saw Pooch in front of him, holding onto a stretcher.

He remembered the way Jensen's arm had hung, dead, off the edge of that stretcher. He'd been sure Jake _was_ dead, or near enough. The thought of it now, the image in his mind, made him wish he had Jake's knack for forgetting the bad stuff.

Though given what Jake had been through to acquire that little skill, maybe he should count himself lucky.

> They’d only been a team for three months when they were sent to Colombia, and they were still getting to know each other. Colombia sucked all the time, but even by their usual standard, it had been a hard day. There’d been the raid gone sideways, of course, but it was more the firefight that followed that got most of them on edge—or rather, Jake's idea of how to end the firefight.
> 
> "That was awesome," he crowed, trying to respike his drying hair. "Eat that, Louganis!"
> 
> "Fuck you, Jensen," Pooch sniped back, yelping as Carlos gave him a shot of local anesthetic so he could clean and sew the bullet wound. "What the hell did you think you were doing, man?"
> 
> Jensen was still all smiles after their two-story dive into the bad guy's swimming pool. "Saving your ass, actually. Come on, Pooch! Didn't you feel just like Mel Gibson, leaping off that balcony?"
> 
> "You fucking _threw_ me off that balcony, J," Pooch grumbled, though Carlos could tell he was bitching just to bitch. Jensen's move, while crazy, had definitely gotten the two of them out of the line of fire in very short order and prevented anything worse than the through-and-through in Pooch's upper arm that had prompted Jensen to make the jump in the first place.
> 
> Jensen blew a carefree raspberry. "I didn't _throw_ you," he disputed. "I just..." He smiled childishly. "I escorted you out of the hacienda through an alternate exit."
> 
> Pooch glared at the six-foot-one eight-year-old in their midst for a solid minute before he snorted good-naturedly. "One of these days, that crazy of yours is gonna get you killed."
> 
> “Yeah,” Roque put in, still ferociously angry two hours later. “And are we gonna talk about that?” Carlos kept working on Pooch’s arm, Clay shook his head in annoyance, and Pooch closed his eyes and just flat out ignored their most volatile member. “Or more importantly, about the fact that he could have gotten _you_ killed?” Which had been Roque to a tee back then: you want to get yourself killed, go ahead, but bring down a team member with you and it's a whole other story.
> 
> He'd sure as hell forgotten that edict somewhere along the way. Carlos often wondered if Roque had been twisted by Bolivia in a different way than the rest of them, made colder. In that Columbian jungle, it had been clear back then that he was still coming down from the very real fear that, in setting off those charges when he did, he’d killed two of his teammates. And Jake had told him to do it—so it was Jake’s fault, right?
> 
> Jensen didn’t even blink. “I knew he could swim.” He looked at Pooch in mock horror. “You _can_ swim, right?” The joke garnered a faint grin from Pooch, who looked like he was starting to drift a little as he came down from the adrenaline.
> 
> “God damn, can you not be serious for one fucking second?” Roque had growled. He hadn’t known Jensen long enough to learn to tune him out yet, and back then he’d had no time for the crazy tech. And again, he’d been scared. “Jesus, did your daddy never knock any sense into you?”
> 
> “Roque,” Clay called, low and quelling, right as Carlos saw Jensen’s grin tighten almost imperceptibly. Something was happening here, because Clay didn’t play Dad often. Internal disputes were fought out because it was safer that way—blow off steam and move on.
> 
> “No, man, seriously.” Roque glared at Jensen, who stared right back. “How the fuck’d you get into covert anyway—fucking child, gonna get the rest of us killed. Parents should’ve raised you better.”
> 
> Even for Roque, the comment had been harsh, but the reaction from Jensen was one they’d never seen before. He did finally blink, a blank look on his usually animated face. And then a switch was flipped and he’d smiled blithely. “Guess they were too busy killing each other to bother with me.” He hefted his M4 and nodded to Clay. “I got watch, Boss.”
> 
> And he’d disappeared into the jungle.
> 
> Roque realized immediately that he’d crossed a line none of them knew about, and he looked at Clay for guidance. “He for real with that?”
> 
> Clay had a blank look of his own which said more than any sadness or sympathy would have. “Murder-suicide,” he muttered. “He was sixteen.”
> 
> “Damn,” Pooch whispered, shock heavy in his tone.

None of them mentioned it again, and for a long time, nobody tried to dig into Jake’s family business. He’d clearly grown up as sane as he was likely to, and he didn’t seem to be hiding anything deep and dark—well, darker than that, anyway. He did his job, he was fun on downtime, and he looked after his team, even if he was occasionally really stupid about his methods. Carlos never did find out whether it was his father or his mother that did the deed, but from the few bits Jensen had spilled over the years, it could have been either.

Carlos had sought out Jensen after giving him some time to calm down, and found the tech sitting quietly on a log, staring at the trees. He hadn’t said a word, just sat down on that same log and waited. They’d been nowhere near the friends they were now, but they'd clicked right from the beginning and Carlos already knew that talking first wouldn't help.

> Jensen finally blew out a breath. “That could’ve gone better, huh?”
> 
> Carlos had shrugged. “Pooch is still alive,” he replied, giving Jensen an out in case he wanted to take it.
> 
> Unsurprisingly, Jake did. “Yeah. Probably pretty pissed, though, huh?” He sighed. “I didn’t really see any other way,” he said slowly, as if admitting something secret. “He had more guys coming in the back. We couldn’t get to the stairs, and Pooch was shot up… We were gonna burn from the charges or shoot it out with them.” The shrug he gave was eloquent in its hopelessness. “It was jump or die, you know?”
> 
> Carlos had nodded. The rest of them hadn’t known about the other men, but the explosives Roque had planted had taken down the whole damn hacienda. Jake’s demand for Roque to blow it, followed by him and Pooch flying through the air toward the pool had been perfectly timed. He’d made sure the group coming up on the two of them was dust while getting an injured teammate to safety. It wasn’t actually his fault he’d scared the shit out of the rest of them doing it.
> 
> Jake took a deep breath, looking for all the world like he was shoving it all in a box so he could close the lid. “Well, I’m ready to forget that one,” he whispered, so quietly Carlos hadn’t been quite sure he’d heard right. Then Jake suddenly grinned. “It really was a hell of a dive, though, huh?”
> 
> Carlos hadn’t known what to make of it—Jake was so completely himself again that it was kind of disturbing. Still, Carlos had smiled. “You looked more like Joe Pesci.”
> 
> “Yeah, fuck you,” Jensen had lobbed back gratefully.

Carlos was shaken out of the memory when Jensen tried to roll over in his sleep. He hissed without waking as his burned temple touched the pillow and made him shy away to a neutral position on his back. It was wrong that he looked so much more peaceful now, with all the injuries, than he had in months. Whatever the electrocution had done to him, it had finally given him a dreamless sleep.

He looked like he’d sleep for a long while yet, too, so Carlos stretched very carefully, not at all his feline namesake. Annoyed by the sling on his arm and the stiffness in his chest, he rose in search of the caffeine and painkillers he needed. He stopped by the adjoining bathroom and found something in the medicine cabinet to take the edge off, then made his way into the hall silently. Clay would not be sleeping, because he was Clay and he'd screwed up so there was no reprieve, but Carlos didn’t have any great desire to talk to his boss right at the moment, so discretion seemed the better part of valor.

He was angry at Clay, which he realized wasn't entirely fair. He’d never trusted Aisha—no one had trusted Aisha, including Clay, really—but they’d all agreed to throw in with her. And while they expected to be stabbed in the back at some point, it was just bad luck that Jensen had caught the short end of that particular honed, metal stick.

Except that Jake had warned them. He’d known, somehow—this parallel reality or skewed timeline or whatever—that Aisha couldn’t be trusted with this mission, and Clay had split them all up anyway. Carlos was far more pissed off about Clay _not_ trusting Jake, despite the tech’s increasingly strange behavior, than he was about Clay _trusting_ Aisha. Jake was family and Aisha was not.

At least Jensen had paid her back for it. Painfully, if what Clay told Carlos was any indication.

He made his way to the kitchen and quietly brewed a fresh pot of coffee, musing on the bizarre turn their already bizarre lives had taken. Time travel… He wasn’t sure he believed it, was in fact pretty sure he _didn’t_ , but Jensen did.

Whether the memories Jake had in his head were real or not, whether the Losers really had gone through hell in some alternate reality as Jensen claimed, was largely academic to Carlos. His best friend was tortured by images and events he couldn’t forget, and because he couldn’t, he was in very real danger of becoming something that was not Jake Jensen at all. Carlos saw it, even if no one else did.

Over the years, the team had gotten other tiny glimpses of exactly how crappy Jensen had had it as a kid, and all of them learned that his way of dealing with that was to aggressively ignore the majority of his childhood. He’d tell you he didn’t remember it, and he’d actually convinced himself of that.

According to him, his life was great—he forced himself to forget enough of the bad stuff to make it true—and he embraced it with no reservations. It made him seem goofy and childish most of the time, but he’d never become the wife-and-child-beating son of a bitch his father was, nor married a Mommy Dearest like his mom, so goofy and childish didn’t seem so bad in comparison.

By contrast, his older sister forgot nothing about their childhood, except maybe to learn from it. Jenny was as compassionate as her brother and much more opposed to violence, but she'd still ended up marrying a man who at one point held a knife to her throat in front of their three-year-old daughter. Luckily, Jake had been there to take care of the problem. The price in that situation had been a knife in the gut, too, strangely enough.

The incident had been enough to break down Jake's self-imposed memory loss, and the team found out he'd once been that three-year-old watching their father do the same damn thing. And right after he’d spoken that revelation to the rest of them, Jake had used his magic words: _Forget this, too._ And he had.

Now though, it was like there was too much to forget at once, and his mind, always a world of flashing lights and fast-moving objects, was taking a darker turn as he failed to forget what he needed to. He’d never been quick to anger—"that's just too much energy, man"—but now it and confusion were all he had. And it needed an outlet.

He’d always had the physical capability to be a killer, but he’d chosen to curb it—even with his murderous brother-in-law—but his voice when he had spoken of the man who’d tortured him, his eyes when he’d first realized Calavicci’s part in whatever the hell was going on…? That bloodthirsty man was not his Jake Jensen. His father Robert, maybe—Carlos had never met the man, obviously, but he sounded like Jake had looked.

Somehow, though, Calavicci had gotten through to him. Carlos didn’t know how exactly, but when he and the others walked back in, the man in that bed who tried to explain time travel and parallel realities and lost friends in almost animated fashion was _Jake_. The compassion in his eyes when he told them what happened to Calavicci’s friend, the pain and friendship when he looked at Carlos himself, that was the man who had to make it out of this.

So Carlos gave up and just believed. Because that was what was needed to get Jake back. He hoped. Really, Jake's life had always been about parallels, hadn't it? From knives in his gut to knives at his loved ones’ throats... Why should he _not_ have a parallel reality, right?

And if a retired Navy admiral was the one who could help Jake deal with it...?

The coffee dripped its last into the pot, and Carlos poured himself a cup, then came to a decision and poured another, looping his fingers through the handles so that he was carrying both in his one good hand. Instead of heading straight back to Jake, he headed for the secure room at the other end of the house.

He wasn’t surprised to find Pooch sleeping lightly in the room across the hall, his door open with a clear view of the Admiral’s. Pooch was probably more trusting than any of them, but he didn’t take kindly to people messing with his family. Carlos eased into the room, putting the two cups down quietly so he could get the key and talk to Calavicci.

Pooch woke (with the smell of coffee, probably) and gazed up at Carlos blearily for a minute before looking over at the locked door and then at the growing light through the window. “Jesus, man, what the hell time is it?”

“Early,” Carlos assured him. “Go back to sleep. I’ll take care of our visitor.”

His friend considered the offer, then sat up and took hold of Carlos’s cup of coffee, drinking half at a go. “How’s J?”

Carlos sighed at the loss of the much needed caffeine. “Sleeping.”

“He okay to be left alone?” Pooch stretched more fluidly than Carlos had been able to, which was grossly unfair, and rose, keeping hold of the coffee. “I’m gonna go check on him,” he said, as if any answer Carlos could give wouldn’t matter. And it wouldn’t. Jensen would be watched and protected until he proved able to protect himself.

Pooch picked up the key and handed it to Carlos. “I don’t know about that guy,” he admitted, looking at the door across the hall uneasily. “I mean, come on, time travel? Switching bodies? All seems too SciFi Channel to me, you know?”

Carlos nodded. “But not to Jensen.”

Pooch grinned. “Hell, Coug, alien abduction ain’t too SciFi for J, you know that.” He clapped Carlos on the back as he moved around him and headed down the hall, lifting the stolen coffee cup as he went. “Thanks for the brew, buddy.”

Carlos glared after him and put the key in the door, deactivating the alarm and unlocking it. He knocked quietly, knowing the hour, but the Admiral opened it quickly, fully dressed—still, it looked like—with a cooperative look on his exhausted face. He hadn’t slept, obviously, and Carlos reluctantly gave him the remaining coffee cup. The Admiral appeared to need it more than he did.

“Morning,” Calavicci grumbled, sipping the stimulant. “The Kid okay?”

It was strange that he was so concerned for Jensen. Not just because apparently Jensen was the key to finding his missing friend, but because Jensen was hurt. The compassion in the guy’s eyes seemed so genuine…

“He’s still sleeping,” Carlos replied.

“That’s good.” He peered at Carlos critically. “Seems like you could have used a little more yourself.” Again, he actually seemed to care.

Calavicci clearly read his distrust and sighed. “Look, I know you guys don’t trust me—I mean I get that you don’t trust anyone—but I can help Jensen.” He sipped his coffee and tilted his head ruefully. “Well, I can try, at least. Whether he can stuff the right stuff into the box is up to him.”

Carlos didn’t react to the comment, even though it was exactly what his own thoughts had been since he woke up. He simply led the way to the kitchen. “I’m making breakfast.”

Calavicci took it for the olive branch it was. “I could eat.”

***********

With no more conversation between them, Alvarez led him to the kitchen and left him to his own well-supervised devices while he went about fixing breakfast one-handed.

Al sat at the large wooden table, looked out at the secluded beach, and considered what to tell them and what to discuss with Jensen in private, since Jensen seemed like he'd let there _be_ a private.

He liked Alvarez. Hell, he liked all of them. But from what Ziggy had dug up they were the most damaged group of men he’d seen since he’d left Vietnam. Pooch's life had been refreshingly normal, barring the usual black ops SNAFUs, before the fiasco in Bolivia. But Alvarez and Clay hadn't had what you'd call apple pie lives, and Roque, by all accounts, had been born a bastard and stayed that way until he betrayed them all and was killed for it. It wasn’t surprising that a kid with Jensen’s history had fit in just fine with these other Losers.

The four of them were all they had in the world, thanks to that nozzle Max, and the kid's outburst last night proved that whatever had happened in the alternate timeline had been disastrous for all of them. Al wasn’t sure how they'd all react when he and Jensen got down to brass tacks and started piecing THERE together.

Alvarez put a plate of eggs in front of him, distracting him from his thoughts just as Clay walked in. The sniper's back stiffened slightly, but there was no other sign he was pissed at his boss. Al had no idea what had gone on before the raid on Max’s compound, but it was obvious it was hurting them all.

Clay saw Alvarez’s twitch and seemed to feel he deserved it, but a good leader moves on from disaster, and Clay was trying to do just that.

“Any of those left?” he asked quietly. When Alvarez grunted and gestured to the pan, Clay took it in stride and scooped the remnants of the runny eggs onto a plate of his own. All three men were halfway through the meal before he spoke again.

“What’s your plan, Admiral?” It was said with the same combination of distrust and cooperation that marked the beginning of any inter-agency op. Al took it as a good sign.

“Ziggy needs to determine the size and shape of the offshoot,” he said, seeing the two men fight with their disbelief. “And I need Jensen to focus for that to happen.”

“Yeah, that might be a tall order,” Clay said, self-recrimination in every syllable. “You might have noticed his brain’s been fried.”

“Maybe not as much as you think,” Al returned. He didn’t like explaining this to the two of them without Jensen present, but he was probably going to have to.

“Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow.”

_Or not._

“J, get the hell back in the bed,” Porteous griped from down the hall. Clay and Alvarez exchanged a wry grin and Alvarez got up to make more eggs. Al wondered if it was all they had or all he knew how to make.

“Ow. Ow. No way, man. I peed, I took my pills, I want to eat.” Jensen sounded rocky as hell and every other footfall was light and tentative.

“Whatever, man,” Porteous said, rounding the corner toward the kitchen so the rest of them could see him half-carrying the taller Jensen into the room. “You fall on your ass, you get to explain it to the medic when she comes to check you out.”

Jensen stopped as he saw the three of them. "This is nice," he observed, smirking. "Very domestic." He looked over at the stove. "Don't make mine too runny, dear!"

Alvarez casually gave him the finger and continued cooking.

Porteous, meanwhile, was trying to manhandle him into a chair. Jensen finally snapped, growling and trying to shove him away. "Leave me the hell alone—I can't sit with this fucking leg, okay?"

His friend backed off at the genuine and very abrupt anger in Jensen's tone. It was funny that they all seemed surprised by Jensen’s violence, given that the kid had almost broken Al’s nose when he was at the Project, but it seemed, outside of combat, he wasn’t much of a fighter. Given what Ziggy had told him about Jensen’s parents, that was either really surprising, or the only way he’d grown up sane.

"Might be why you're supposed to be in bed, Jensen," Clay said mildly, pretending not to be fazed by the outburst.

Jensen cast him a baleful glare, but kept his mouth shut and propped himself against the counter. Clay might discourage the use of military titles, but they still functioned as a military unit after more than a year as fugitives. And it was clear that Jensen wasn't biting back not out of any self-control on his part, but because Clay was his commanding officer.

Alvarez placed a plate of hard cooked scrambled eggs on the counter next to Jensen and said quietly, "Eat." It was disturbingly like any number of times Al himself had done basically the same thing to Sam during the early days of PQL.

"So did you guys start figuring out how to reshuffle my deck already?" Jensen asked out of the blue.

Clay smirked at the analogy. "You've been missing at least half that deck for a while, Kid," he told him, sipping his coffee.

"Well now I have two," Jensen shot back testily. "I kind of know which is which, but..." He shrugged. He sounded tired and in pain, but less confused than he had yesterday. Maybe that Protective Compartmentalization Beeks used to talk about was kicking in.

"We have a lot to discuss, if you're up for it?" Al asked, purposely putting everything in Jensen's court. If he wasn't in charge, this wouldn't happen.

Jensen took a deep breath to steel himself, and Al watched Alvarez perk up, as if the very move was significant. Al wondered if the sniper had watched Jensen shuffling memories to the bottom of the deck before.

"It's worth a shot," Jensen replied.

“Let’s start with what happened in 1998,” Porteous said, nodding his thanks to Alvarez when a plate was put down in front of him. “You and J were kind of light on the details last night.”

Al nodded. Jensen hadn’t been up to much. “In the original timeline, you were supposed to track down and eliminate an Afghan warlord named al Rahkim.”

Clay nodded. “But you’re saying we never got him.”

“Not the first time, right,” Jensen mumbled. When all eyes turned to him, Al could only offer him a compassionate shrug. Jensen glared in response, but continued the story. This was good. Al had his own set of memories and he needed to see where his and Jensen’s diverged.

Jensen leaned heavily on the counter. “Al’s friend did, when he… leaped—you guys couldn’t’ve found a better name for it?—into me and I ended up in New Mexico. My memory of that time was nothing, from either place. I thought then that I had just had one of those intense hacks where I zone out so completely, I sort of lose track.” His glare was back on Al. “Turns out someone else was doing the hacking.”

Al took up the conversation and went back over what they’d sketched out last night, adding more detail. “We were in 2002 at the time. Ziggy had information on Rahkim based on historical data that Jensen wouldn’t have been able to acquire at the time. It made the difference in finding his main base.”

Jensen was wilting, but it was clear he wasn’t willing to return to his room. “The first time, we didn’t find Rahkim and one of his lieutenants, our old friend Fadhil—” he smiled bleakly as they all responded again to the name— “had him assassinated and took over his power base. We caught up with him a few months later in the Khyber Pass.” He began speaking faster, trying to tell them everything, even though it looked like he was about to pass out. “He was selling kids, THERE. We moved in to evac the kids before the airstrike.”

“Stop.” Clay’s voice brooked absolutely no argument and Jensen raised his head to look at his CO as the older man put a firm hand on his arm. “You fall on your ass on this floor, I’m gonna catch hell for it from that nurse of yours.”

“She's a friggin' doctor, man. And it’s your fault anyway,” Jensen muttered angrily, allowing himself to be manhandled into the adjoining living room, where there was a chaise that would probably be easier on his leg. Al frowned as he saw a few dots of fresh blood soaking through the bandages that peeked out under Jensen’s shorts.

“I know, Kid,” Clay replied candidly. “Let’s just get you settled and you can finish telling us your fantastical journey.”

“Not very fucking fantastical from here,” Jensen whispered. He took another of those settling breaths—ones that seemed to relax Alvarez even more than Jensen—and continued more calmly.

“Where was I?” he asked rhetorically, answering himself. “Right, selling children. We snuck in and evaced the kids and the strike team lit the place and burned it to the ground. Then we hiked out with the kids and headed for the rendezvous.”

“I don’t like where this is headed,” Porteous commented quietly.

“Same shit, different timeline,” Jensen replied. He’d glossed over this part last night, and Al had a sick idea why. “Kids go up instead of us. Kids go down instead of us.” He looked at Alvarez with almost crushing compassion. “Cougar was... close—closer even than Bolivia. He heard and saw and smelled….” He took a breath, tight and shivering. “He was never the same.”

“Shit,” Clay whispered after a long moment.

“Max sent us there—you met with him for the first time in the desert the day before,” Jensen said, continuing the story his exhaustion had cut short last night. “After what happened, you got very revenge-y on him.” He cocked his head back and hissed at the pain as he closed his eyes. “Things kind of went the way they’ve been going for us the last couple of years, actually.” He looked over at Al suddenly. “Is that what you do? Just delay things? Minimize damage?”

Al swallowed. It was something he’d thought about too damn many times when history seemed to repeat itself. “Not usually. What gets fixed tends to stay fixed.”

Jensen shrugged and whined a little as if the movement pulled on something. “Glitch in the system,” he pronounced. His team were staring at him in various states of disbelief and pity and Jensen was ignoring them fiercely. “Anyway, everything was shit for forever: Aisha was a bitch but useful, Roque was an asshole and sold us out to Max and cut off Pooch’s finger in Pripyat and then I blasted the fucker with a bomb sniffer and a nuclear bomb went off and there was this massive earthquake in the Gulf and—”

“Wait,” Al said quietly. “Massive earthquake in the Gulf?” He pulled the handlink out of his pocket and pulled up Ziggy’s logs from the original timeline. “When?”

Jensen shrugged. “MIght have been the same day as Pripyat. We were a little busy trying not to glow in the dark.”

Al looked up when the nuclear explosion had happened. “There was a minor quake about 115 miles southeast of Muscat.”

“New Jerusalem,” Jensen murmured, his eyes closing. Al wondered if the kid was going to last long enough to get this all out. “Mile of seafloor popped up as dry land with a reinforced oil derrick on top and Max claimed it as a sovereign state. So fucking Indiana Jones.”

Al activated the voice interface. “What do you think, Ziggy?” he asked. “Is that our event?”

“ _It is unlikely that the earthquake recorded in either known timeline could have caused such an event. It would have to be engineered or enhanced—possibly by a nuclear explosion like the one in Ukraine,_ ” Ziggy replied, causing Jensen to whisper an amused, “Hey, Zig.”

“ _Good morning, Captain Jensen,_ ” Ziggy replied. Seriously, Sam was going to have to program the flirt out of her when he got home. Al snorted at his own optimism. _When._ “ _The earthquake did not occur at any significant magnitude during either the original or the revised timeline. It must have been altered after the split._ ”

“Three timelines?” Al asked. Great. At least Jensen’s remembered timeline seemed stable, even if it was slightly different from the original.

“ _It is impossible to tell for certain without scanning the event and those surrounding it while correlating Captain Jensen’s brainwaves. I am afraid I will be unable to determine the event which spawned the offshoot until I have access to the Project._ ”

Al scrubbed his head. “Yeah, that’s gonna be a tall order, Zig,” he told her. He seriously had no idea how they were getting in. Everyone at Stallions Gate knew to deny him entry, so they were going to have to sneak in.

He was too damn old for this.

“J’s out,” Porteous whispered, shaking Al from his thoughts, and sending his glance over to the chaise where Jensen lay still, his mouth slightly open as snores huffed out softly.

Clay’s amused voice was equally quiet. “So’s Cougar.”

Porteous stood up and stretched, looking at Al speculatively. “This is gonna take forever if we have to wait for those two to stay conscious for more than five minutes.” He frowned and touched his stomach. “Ugh. Those eggs are sitting like a rock. I need some real breakfast. You coming Spaceman?”

Al was still looking at Jensen, wondering about the other things the kid had mentioned yesterday as he rambled—and then musing at the fact that he seemed to be rambling less today. He wished he could contact Verbena and see what she had to say about the matter, but he didn’t want to drag any of the rest of the Project team into this if things went south. Still, her psychiatrist’s insights would help—she’d explained his mind’s defense mechanism back in the beginning, but honestly, he’d been trying hard not to go crazy at the time.

If Jensen’s natural ability to sort memory and experience was already kicking in, it could just be a matter of time before he learned to cope with the images in his brain, the way Al himself had. It would never be perfect, and God knew it never, _ever_ went away, but maybe someday the kid could go through a day without reliving something that didn’t really happen.

“Spaceman?”

Al looked up. “What?” Did Porteous just call him Spaceman. “Huh?”

Porteous shrugged. “You went into space, you’re a spaceman. It seems good enough for J.”

“Yeah, I went into space,” Al agreed, standing stiffly and following Porteous back to the kitchen. Clay hadn’t moved, and didn’t look like he was going to before either Alvarez or Jensen woke up. “It wasn’t this hard.”

*********  
to be continued…


	12. Chapter 12

Once Jake and Cougar were done with their completely unscheduled naps, Jake and the Admiral got down to working with Ziggy to map out what happened THERE. Clay, guilty and pissed, wandered away pretty quickly, which suited Jake just fine. And Coug, being Coug, sat down with a Spanish romance novel and didn't read it.

Jake would never admit that he actually needed the support of his friend's silent presence. Things that happened THERE and HERE were sometimes eerily similar yet different and Jake got confused and frustrated as hell more than once. And right now (though hopefully not forever) frustration meant the kind of blinding anger that had always scared the shit out of him when it was coming from him.

“I don’t understand how the fuck we managed to run exactly the same scam in Florida and Texas three years apart—how the fuck does that work?!” he shouted, throwing a peanut from the bowlful he’d been munching. The nut landed hard in Cougar’s lap, and Cougar looked up at him mildly, as if to ask what the hell he’d done that for.

“Sorry, Coug,” Jake said immediately. “Sorry.” He snorted, putting his hands to his head and pulling them away as they sent little sparks of pain across his burnt skin. “Sorry. God, I’m starting to really feel like a Jensen.” Calavicci looked up curiously, but, no, they were not discussing Jensen family anger management issues. Jake sucked in a breath that did nothing to reduce the ache in his brain or his frustration, but did at least knock the free-floating aggression back a step.

Ziggy was great for filing and correlating the differences between HERE and THERE, but right now Jake really wanted a pencil and _some alone time_ to make a chart of the two timelines. And he was going to start thinking of them as “the two timelines,” because THERE and HERE sounded crazier. Sort of.

Okay, not really crazier at all, but less precise, and a little precision in the fucking chaos that was his brain right now would be a great thing. Calavicci had explained the whole concept of Dr. Beckett’s string theory—how a life was a string and if you balled it up, any moment in it could touch any other moment—and it actually made sense in a sort of SciFi Channel way.

What made less sense was the idea that, somehow, something that had happened in Jake’s alternate timeline had frayed Sam Beckett’s string and sent him off on a snag in the timeline where a whole different alternate reality lived.

Where Jake lived. At the same time he lived here.

Shit, this was screwed up. He took a deep breath, trying desperately to focus and put his thoughts in order—shove the bad stuff to the back where he didn't have to think about it. He was _good_ at this! He'd been doing it his whole life, for fuck's sake.

But there was just so God damned _much of it_ right now!

"All right, so where were we?" he asked, trying to sound normal and very aware he didn't, even without Cougar's worried gaze, thanks.

“We need to know all the possible events that could've caused this," Calavicci said, leaning forward tiredly and draining the last of another cup of coffee. "According to Sam's theory, a snag like this can be caused by anything along the length of it, so we're looking for something with a lot of power. Something with enough energy to knock Sam out of our reality and create a new one.”

“Well, let’s see,” Jake replied, trying to pretend this wasn’t happening; like it was just a story—not a life he remembered in full, vivid, painful detail. “There was the nuke in Pripyat. The megaquake in the Gulf.” He started tittering brokenly. “The volcanic eruption on Montserrat.” He just couldn’t quite believe he was saying this, looking over at Cougar like he was seeing a ghost. “The nuke Coug set off on that oil tanker.” He tried to hold in the anger and betrayal that he felt about that—seriously, he did. But he was tired and torn apart and he remembered everything so damn clearly now and it all came out. “You were supposed to fucking wait for me, Cougar,” he grated, as guilt swamped him until he almost couldn’t speak. “I was coming back!”

The look on Coug's face, a combination of sadness, worry, and pity for the batshit-crazy guy, was too much.

"Fuck it," he grated, pulling himself to his feet and knowing he'd be lucky if he made it down the hall without falling on his ass. "I need to pee."

To his credit, Cougar didn't move, and he didn't follow Jake with his eyes. Calavicci did, but kept his seat. Jake leaned on every available support until he got to the hall, and then he just leaned against the wall, sliding along it and knocking a couple of pictures on the ground when he had to, until he got to the bathroom where he shut and locked the door, did his business, and balanced himself on his one sound leg to wash his hands. He stared in the mirror at the bruised, burned, shot-up mess of a face.

It reminded him vaguely of looking at the reflection of Dr. Beckett at Quantum Leap, because he had no clue who was staring back at him. He’d tried so hard not to be his parents’ son, but he saw both of them in his face. Was he them? He felt out of control like they always were—like he wanted to hit everything and everyone, like nothing couldn’t be solved by just beating it into submission.

But he wasn’t so far gone that he’d let it be that guy he saw there. So who was it? Was it the guy who'd hugged a little Afghan boy named Ahmed and then helped him into a helicopter that became his coffin? Was he the guy who'd helped stop the port of LA from becoming a crater? Was he the guy who'd stood on a beach on this fucking island, gun in his hand as he remembered that his best friend was atoms in the sea because he couldn't get him out?

His left fist lashed out without his knowledge, shattering the mirror with a crash and tinkle loud enough to stop his thoughts for one brief second. It was sufficient for him to regain his mental footing enough to know that Clay was going to kill him, if Cougar didn't get to him first, and to realize that he'd just bought himself a dozen new stitches at least.

That beating it into submission thing wouldn’t work anyway, he realized with a giggle as he looked at the shards of mirror left in the frame. He was losing. Whatever fight he was supposed to win here—against anger or memory or whatever—he wasn't. He was pretty sure he couldn't. THERE was just too much to deal with.

"Jensen!" Cougar's bark of anger and worry made him jump, and he nearly landed on his ass to add insult to injury, as Cougar rattled the doorknob. "Unlock the fucking door, _pendejo_!"

Jake laughed. There was nothing else to do at this point. He reached over with the hand that wasn't bleeding over the sink and unlocked the door. "Jeez, Cougar," he scolded, looking at the stark fear on his best friend's face. "Language, man. Language."

Cougar took his hand and examined it, glaring at Jake when he saw the damage. "You are going to your bed and I will strap you down if I have to," he commanded, pulling a finger towel off its hook and wrapping it around the bleeding knuckles.

Calavicci was right behind Cougar, looking sad and compassionate. Pooch and Clay came barreling toward them from the direction of their rooms. "Great," Jake said, laughter still thick in his voice because _of course_ he'd get a full audience for his rank stupidity. "Gang's all here."

"I'll call the medic," Pooch growled—and did they all have to be angry at him, really? Cougar, he could understand, he'd left him to die after all, but the others? "See if she'll come check him a couple hours early."

Jake looked at his watch suddenly, spilling more blood off his wrist and into the sink and dislodging the bloody towel. It was only lunchtime. God damn, it had already been a long day.

Clay moved forward to take his not-bleeding arm over his shoulder and all but dragged him down the hall to his room. Luckily, it was a short trip, because Jake let himself be manhandled for a grand total of forty-five seconds before he couldn’t stand it anymore and struck out, falling onto the bed as he pushed Clay away. “I can handle this myself.”

“Not from where I’m standing,” Clay grunted, stepping back to let Cougar in with a wet cloth to rewrap his hand.

Jake stared at the sliced knuckles for the first time, completely detached from the fact that he’d done that and the thoughts he’d been thinking when he did. “Huh,” he said, sounding crazy to his own ears, never mind what he might sound like to the others. “That was… surreal.”

Pooch was suddenly in the doorway, staring at him like everyone else. “She’s heading over in a few.” He whistled low. “Good job, J. You didn’t lose enough blood in Brazil?”

“Shut up,” was all Jake could come up with. He was slipping. He fell back on the bed, chuckling a little pathetically. Maybe a lot pathetically. _God, I really am slipping._ He’d thought—when he woke up this morning, _he'd thought_ he was better. He’d slept an entire night without remembering anything. Not that he’d managed to actively forget it yet, but he thought he was at least _ignoring_ it all sufficiently.

“This your idea of helping him?” Clay asked Calavicci quietly, like Jake wasn’t even in the room. “Stirring the pot so he’s…”

“...crazier than ever?” Jake finished for him when he faltered. He chuckled again. “Who even knew that was possible?”

“Colonel—” Calavicci started.

“Don’t call me Colonel,” Clay barked. Honestly, why the hell he kept that up, Jake was never going to figure out. He was Colonel Clay. It was like his first name now. “I don’t know what you hope to gain from all this, feeding into his—”

“—delusions?” Jake interrupted again. He sat up as Clay flinched at his choice of words. That was enough. “Look, boss, I don’t care whether you believe this—I’m pretty sure _I_ don’t really believe it, either. But I’m seriously thinking the alternative is a rubber room or a swim with full weights.” He finally looked Clay full in the eyes, because he knew that last comment would shock him. He shocked himself, actually, because it was kind of true. He couldn’t live like this. “Let me get this done.”

Everyone held his breath around the two of them, and Jake didn’t blink. He didn’t have a lot of sanity left, but he wanted to keep what he had and that meant making sure Clay and the others either helped or stayed out of the way.

Clay finally sighed shakily, running a hand over his face. “Kid, this is so fucked up.”

“Oh, you got no argument here, sir,” Jake replied with a tired smile. “But it’s not like our lives have been exactly normal up to now.” He looked over at Calavicci, who stood silently in the corner, watching with a searing familiarity in his eyes. He might be the only person in the entire fucking world who had any idea what was going on in Jake’s head.

“Maybe we should take a break,” Calavicci said quietly. He clearly didn't want to set off any more explosions. “Let you get fixed up.”

“Physically, anyway,” Jake muttered. _Fine. Leave me with my crazy._ He laid back down with his bleeding hand held carefully on his chest. Now that reaction was setting in, the thing hurt like a son of a bitch. “I’m hungry. Anyone else hungry?”

Pooch snorted at the non sequitur. “Just call me your local delivery man,” he offered finally. “I’m not eating any more of Cougar’s food.”

“I want lomi lomi,” Jake told him. _The vegetarian thing didn’t last long, did it?_ He closed his eyes and let himself drift a little. It was ridiculous to be this tired. Losing your mind was exhausting, apparently.

“Last I checked, we were in the Caribbean, not Hawaii,” Clay remarked, trying for normal.

Jake waved his unbloodied hand. “I know. We were as surprised as anyone to find the place—remember that little Hawaiian joint down the street from Kingdom Hall, Pooch?” There was deafening silence, and Jake opened his eyes to stare at the ceiling so he wouldn't see _that look_ on everyone's face. He was HERE. Of course Pooch didn’t remember. “Trust me on this. It’s great.”

“Sure, J,” Pooch assured him, again with that oh-so-familiar combination of pity and concern. He could get really sick of that. “What do the rest of you want?”

Jake floated as they talked around him, but woke abruptly to a light female touch on his hand. Lieutenant Bryant asked him questions about the rest of his injuries and his mental state (she didn’t really want to know about that, so he just lied and said he was fine), and he zoned right back out as she sewed him up, surfacing briefly when Pooch reappeared with a weird look on his face to say that his lomi lomi was here. Jake wasn’t hungry suddenly, and rolled over and went to sleep instead.

  

The sun was setting by the time he woke again, hungry but unwilling to move. His hand hurt worse than the burns on his head, which he'd been sure wasn’t possible, and he rolled over to find the room empty, a glass of water and his pain pills sitting on the bedside table. Huh. He’d’ve bet money after his “full weights” comment that Clay wouldn’t have left him alone for fear he’d just off himself in a moment of insanity.

Or a moment of sanity. At this point, it was kind of a toss up as to which was more dangerous. At least his brain was relatively quiet right this second and he didn't feel as homicidal as he had earlier. He supposed listlessly that he wasn’t really suicidal, either, which was probably good, what with the bottle of pain pills. If he was going to off himself, he would have done it when he was thirteen and Jenny left for college and he was the only one his parents had left to beat on. The memory of a gun on a beach turned his stomach for a minute. That didn’t count. It wasn’t HERE.

The door to the bathroom creaked open and he sighed. Of course they hadn’t left him alone, his watchdog just needed to pee. He heard footsteps coming from that area, but didn’t bother to see who it was.

“Hey Kid, you hungry?” the Admiral asked. Jake looked up at him, surprised.

“Who’s watching you?” he asked tactlessly. Clay would never let Calavicci be the one to guard him.

The Admiral grinned wryly. “Your friend Alvarez. Clay went out to think.” Jake snorted loudly at that. “Yeah. Porteous is his designated driver.”

“He is the transport expert, after all,” Jake observed. “So Coug decided it was safe to leave you alone with me?”

“I think so,” Calavicci said, pretending confusion. “He nodded at me and said to wake him when you were ready for dinner.”

“Better than a blessing, Admiral.” God, he was still tired. He _was_ hungry, though. “Anyone eat my lunch?” he asked, trying to drag himself to the edge of the bed with one hand and one leg. Fucking comedy act.

“He also might’ve said if I let you out of the bed for anything other than hitting the head, he’d shoot me.”

Jake smiled wide at that. “And _that_ is better than a promise.” He gave up trying to get out of bed and settled back with a groan.

"You have a good team," Calavicci said seriously.

"Yeah,” he agreed, but let out a long-suffering sigh. “They're just a lot to deal with, sometimes."

The Admiral nodded, and Jake could see him watching him closely. "Better than family."

Jake grinned coldly. "Don't ask me about my mother, Admiral. You won't like the answers." Though he clearly already knew some of them. Ziggy was a computer, after all, born to hack.

Calavicci laughed sort of hopelessly. "I'm no shrink, Captain," he assured him. "I had enough of them when I came back from Nam." Again, Jake could feel the guy watching for his reaction. "They figure you need a lot of therapy after five years as a POW."

 _Shit._ "Five years. Damn."

"Yeah, well, it wasn't a picnic, that's for sure." He took a deep breath. "Made me a hell of a survivor. Kind of like your parents did you."

“Pretty sure that wasn’t their goal,” Jake chuckled bitterly, sitting back against the pillows. "Nice to know they were good for something, though."

"I used to think about what I'd do when I finally got Stateside again," Calavicci continued, sitting in the chair beside the bed. "Bars I'd visit, places I'd take my wife..." There was a sadness in his eyes that looked too fresh to be about Vietnam.

"Popsicles." God, Jake hadn't thought of that in a million years—most of what he’d forgotten of his childhood seemed to be staying forgotten, thank God. "My mom wouldn't let me and my sister have popsicles—too messy. Beat me into the next afternoon when I came home from a friend's house once. His mom had given me one and I got a little on my shirt. It washed away," he muttered, remembering. It was the first time she’d broken his arm. "The blood didn't. I promised myself when I finally got away from them, I'd eat popsicles until I was sick."

"And did you?" Calavicci asked, though he already knew that answer, too.

"Nah, I hate popsicles—never touch them. It was just something to keep myself from going nuts."

"And I never went to any of those bars," the Admiral admitted softly, "took my wife to other places because I couldn’t stand the reminder." He shook himself out of the memory. "Leaping is like that, sort of. The trick to living with things that are too hard to remember is finding a way to put them to the back of your mind."

 _Forget this._ An image of Clay, burning and screaming and rushing toward Max like some avenging angel slammed itself against Jake's defenses. "Pretty tall order right now, Admiral," he whispered.

The Admiral just chuckled tiredly. "Believe me, I remember." He stood, rubbing his hands on his thighs. “Those first dozen leaps or so? It actually did help to dredge it all up, get it all in order. Once.” He cocked his head. “Then it was just a matter of trying to forget it ever happened in the first place.”

“And did you?” Jake wanted to know it was possible. He needed to.

So of course the Admiral disappointed him and shrugged helplessly. “Sometimes it’s like popsicles.”

 _Something to keep yourself from going nuts._ “Great. Thanks.” Jake looked down at his bandaged hand and tried to summon up his courage. He could do this. He’d forgotten worse, right? Cougar and Clay and 25 Afghan children filled his mind with blood and he curled his torn up hand into a fist. _No. You can’t forget this,_ he told himself, teetering on the brink before he pulled himself back.

He _could_ , actually, because the alternative was to give in to the anger and become his parents or give in to the rest of it and off himself to shut THERE up. He’d done it before, after all and since he was still alive here, it obviously hadn’t helped. _So... popsicles._

“Okay,” he said aloud, forcibly changing the subject. Calavicci sighed, with a look in his eyes that said he knew exactly what Jake was doing and exactly how hard it was. Jake actually felt a little bit better for that. “Lomi lomi?”

*******

Clay wasn’t drunk. Yet. Which was really damned unfortunate, because what he wanted was to be smashed enough that Jensen’s matter of fact “rubber room or a swim in full weights” comment didn’t circle endlessly in his head. Even a month ago—a _week_ ago—he’d’ve said Jake Jensen and suicide were diametrically opposed. He’d have said Jake was only a good kind of crazy back then, too.

“This is stupid, you know?” Pooch said, dropping down on the barstool next to Clay, a beer in his hand.

Clay snorted. _Let me count the ways..._ “Which part?” he asked. “The part where we’re actually believing this time travel shit, or the part where it all hinges on Jensen and his electrocution-fried brain?”

“The part where you’re beating yourself up for that.”

Clay shook his head, looking Pooch straight in the eye. “I’ve screwed up a lot in my life, Pooch. But never like this.”

“So you fucked up. Sure as hell ain't the first time." Pooch took a long pull on his beer. “We’re all still kicking, Clay.” He tipped his head as Clay glared at him. “Maybe not firing on all thrusters, but… He’s alive.”

“He’s hanging on by a thread, Pooch, and you know it.” He waved his scotch. “You heard him.” _The alternative is a rubber room or a swim with full weights._

Pooch sat forward and turned to stare at Clay more fully, his elbows on the bar in front of him. Clay could see he was still pissed—they all were and had every right—but Pooch was focusing on helping Jensen. _More than you been doing lately, Frankie,_ he berated himself. “Then figure out what you can do to fix it, and fix it.”

“There’s no fix for this.” Clay gripped his glass hard. Once you lost the ability to tell reality from delusion, you were well and truly done, right?

“Unless Jake and this Calavicci guy are right.” Pooch met Clay’s disbelief head on. “I know, man, but he was right about the damn Hawaiian place. He was right about Aisha.”

Clay swallowed the rest of his scotch and gestured to the bartender for another. “ _I_ should have been right about Aisha.”

“No,” Pooch shot back, leaning over him as his anger bled out in his voice. “You should have been right about _Jake_.” He slid off the stool and took another pull of beer. “Be right about him now.” He turned his back and started walking away again.

 _Really that simple, huh?_ Clay thought to himself, trying to figure out what the hell he could do and feeling so damn useless when he came up with nothing. _Unless…_

“Hey, Pooch?” he called, knowing the authority in his voice would stop the younger man in his tracks.

“Yeah, Colonel?” Pooch replied, not turning back to him. Clay didn’t correct him this time. It was about fucking time he started acting like the leader of this crew.

“Tell Cougar to start getting our things together.” He pulled out his cellphone. “I have a phone call to make.”

Pooch turned his head just enough for Clay to see his smile before turning back and walking on. “Yes, sir.”

*********  
to be continued…


	13. Chapter 13

Calavicci woke him at ten-thirty to let him know that Jake was up and eating dinner, so Carlos grabbed the leftover long rice from lunch and sat down in the chair next to Jake's bed.

“Should have ordered the poke,” Jake said irritably. “Too much onion.” He stabbed at the salmon salad and shoved some violently into his mouth in a thoroughly un-Jensen move. “That place has gone downhill since I was there.” Something struck Jake funny about that last sentence and he chuckled coldly.

Carlos grunted his sympathy, but carefully. Jake in a bad mood was usually like a five-year-old on the edge of a tantrum. This was more like Roque on a normal day—dangerous and ready to pop at the least provocation.

Jake never talked about his parents and he never got angry, and Carlos was only too aware of why the two were connected. Most of the time, Jake couldn’t even acknowledge that he was afraid to lose control and lash out the way he’d been lashed out at as a kid, but it didn’t make the fear any less real.

"You don't have to be so careful around the crazy man, Cougar," Jake growled when Carlos thought too long. "After all, you guys took all my weapons. Not like I can kill you in your sleep."

For some reason, the abnormal threat prompted a very normal response. "Could kill me with that fork," Carlos pointed out mildly, knowing the ridiculous comment would shake Jake from his thoughts.

Jensen looked at the plastic fork in his hand. "I _could_ ," he admitted, sounding almost like himself. "But how would I finish my dinner?"

Carlos snorted, which caused Jake to laugh weakly. "I'm sorry, man," he apologized with a gusty sigh. "God, I’m sorry—there's just so much in my head!" He chewed his food for a long moment. "And none of it's good, you know? Fucking _none of it._."

Calavicci had disappeared as soon as Carlos sat down, but now he sensed the older man's presence in the hallway and saw the edge of his shoe where he was leaning against the wall. He hoped Jake didn’t notice and close up into himself again.

"You can't forget this," Carlos said quietly, wishing Jake's magic phrase could help and knowing there was just no way it could.

"Even I'm not that good," Jake admitted. "It’s all jumbled up, just like, waiting to ambush me.” And almost on cue, he lapsed into the kind of frozen silence he kept falling into last night. Ambushed. “I wish I could do an info dump," he finally said shakily. “You know? Just get it all out and then degauss my brain?”

For someone like Jake, it was actually a good idea. “You have Anita,” Carlos said, realizing suddenly that Jake hadn’t touched the sleek black laptop since they got here. Clay had retrieved her before they bugged out in Brazil, thank God. Carlos had made the mistake of not saving one of Jake’s computers once before, and the shitstorm was epic. It would never happen again if any of them could prevent it.

Jake moved to put his head in his hands and stopped himself before he touched the burns. “Fuck,” he griped in annoyance. “No, Anita doesn’t need this.” He raised his left hand, showing off the red spots on the dressing over his stitches. “Can’t type fast enough to get it done without going crazy—er, anyway.” He played with his fork. “I’d tell it all to Ziggy, but then I’d have to _say it_ , you know?”

Carlos nodded, knowing how his best friend’s mind worked. Saying it made it real. Jake hadn’t said a word about the chopper in Bolivia for a month afterward, like he was hoping that way it wouldn't be true.

Jake went blank for a second, and Carlos again wondered what he was remembering. His head looked ready to explode—it was time for a diversion.

“Ziggy likes you,” Carlos threw out randomly. He barely heard the snort from behind him and the soft shuffle of Calavicci vacating the area. “You finally have the computer girlfriend you always wanted.”

The smile that earned him was worth it. “Yeah. She definitely sounds sexy.” Jake settled back more comfortably, stabbing at his meal with less violence. “Wonder if she’s based on anyone real?”

*******

Pooch woke up early and started cooking breakfast out of basic self preservation. Cougar ate as soon as he woke up. Always. Unless there was no food, in which case you got the Stomach of Doom growling at you until he filled it. So if he was the first one up, he made breakfast.

And Cougar was the worst cook this side of Jensen—he just didn’t own up to it the way J did. You never saw Jensen in the kitchen unless he was getting a beer from the fridge.

So Pooch thanked his lucky stars that Cougar still felt like enough crap to sleep in and started pulling shit out to make a real meal, with real food that wasn’t either half-raw or burnt to ash.

“Thank you, God,” Clay muttered sleepily as he walked into the kitchen twenty minutes later. “I was afraid we’d have to eat those damn eggs again.”

“Coffee’s on,” Pooch told him by way of reply. “Figure we should spring the Admiral in a few.”

Clay grunted at that. He’d checked Calavicci’s door when he and Pooch got back last night and found it unlocked. He didn’t bother locking it. “If he was going to fuck us over, he’d’ve done it by now,” he said, pouring a mug and adding half a pound of sugar to it. “Or else—” “He’ll fuck us over later when there’s not a damn thing we can do about it,” Pooch finished for him. “But you don’t think he’s going to do that any more than I do.”

Clay smirked bitterly. “My track record ain’t the best, here, Pooch,” he reminded him. “Might not want to use me as your yardstick.”

“I trust him,” Cougar said quietly from the adjoining living room.

Pooch jumped at the sound. “Fuck, man, scare a guy why don’t you?”

Cougar smiled and slipped into the kitchen to swipe a piece of bacon from the pan. “Island life is making you soft,” he replied.

“Oh yeah,” Pooch shot back wryly . “No excitement here.” He scooped the last of the _properly cooked_ eggs onto a plate. “J up to breakfast?”

“Don’t know,” Cougar said with a shrug as he poured his coffee. “Didn’t hear anything from his room when I walked by.”

Pooch looked up in time to see the flash of fear and worry in Clay’s eyes. “Nobody was keeping an eye on him?” Clay asked tightly.

“Last I checked, I wasn’t classified a flight risk,” Jensen called out from the hallway. There was acid in his tone, but not much more than there ever was when he was treated like a fragile tech instead of a covert ops bad ass. “Though I will point out I’m walking down the hall unassisted.”

Pooch couldn’t tell if the thud they heard as he bounced off the wall was calculated humor or just him not falling on his ass.

Cougar took a seat with a look on his face that said he sure as hell wasn’t helping. Given J's response to assistance yesterday, that was probably the best move. The two of them went about their business and dished out their food while Clay tried not to watch Jensen limp in and take an actual seat at the table. The slices on his leg were healing quicker than the medic thought they would, apparently.

“Anybody wake up the Admiral?” Jake asked. He grabbed about half the bacon—Cougar grabbed half that back and returned it to the plate in the middle of the table. “Or are we just going to leave him locked in his cell for the morning?”

“I’m up,” Calavicci said groggily as he shuffled in the room. He looked like he’d actually slept, and he’d showered and shaved already, but he was clearly not a morning person. He went nonverbal as he got himself a cup of coffee and sat down, giving Jensen a nod.

They were all trying to eat without setting Jake off, but when you didn’t know what would set him off, it was hard to say anything. Pooch was more disturbed by Jake’s anger than he thought he’d be. It was just… alien. Of all the people he could think would put their fist through a mirror, Jake was way down the list. Seeing that had shaken him.

It had shaken Jake, too, obviously, as the guy looked up into the silence with guilt in his eyes. “Don’t worry, guys,” Jake muttered quietly. “I’ll try to leave the breakables alone today.” He straightened up and sipped at his coffee. “Ziggy come up with anything?” he asked almost normally, shaking Calavicci from his thoughts.

“Uh, not really,” the Admiral offered, perking up enough to grab a spoonful of eggs. “She’s running scenarios now.” He shrugged. “Not much to do but wait until she gives us something.”

Jake nodded and then looked around at the rest of them. “You should go do things,” he said tightly. “Enjoy the downtime.” _Get the hell away from me before I go more nuts_ —Hell, you could almost hear him say the words.

Pooch didn’t deny they’d been in a holding pattern for too damn long. “We are actually fugitives,” he reminded them all.

“Not in Antigua,” Jake replied. “You can go wherever you want here.” Sounded like he wouldn’t mind if they left right the fuck now. He was scared of something. Pooch sort of thought it might be himself. So he’d help however he could. Giving space, he was good at.

“I’ve always wanted to go swordfishing,” he threw out with a significant look to Clay and Cougar to go along with it.

Jake shook his head with a wry smile. “Yeah, you guys go ahead. The last time we went swordfishing, Roque—” He looked around at the blank faces and huffed out a breath. Closed his eyes. Made a fist.

Because they’d never been swordfishing. Except in that fucked up reality that only lived in Jake’s brain.

“Jensen—” Clay began, only to stop dead as Jake shoved himself to his feet and disappeared down the hall.

There wasn’t a thing they could do except watch him go.

“God damn it,” Clay muttered angrily. “Like navigating landmines in the dark.”

Calavicci’s eyes were too pained and too knowing, and Pooch again got the idea that this guy knew more about what was going on in Jake’s brain than anyone needed to. “Colonel—”

Clay shoved his own seat away from the table and stood. “ _Don’t_ —” He took a second and tried to calm down, like he couldn’t form words for a minute. “Do whatever the fuck you have to do to fix this, and do it fast. Before he loses it completely.”

Pooch watched their CO leave, then set his coffee cup mildly on the table. “And then there were three.”

“Jensen wouldn’t kill himself,” Carlos offered mostly confidently. Pooch nodded, both because he agreed with the assessment and because he knew it was Clay’s fear right at the moment. “He said that more to get Clay to back off than anything. Jake’s angry, and he doesn’t do angry. He’s trying to get us out of the line of fire until it goes away.”

“The shit you’re doing,” Pooch asked Calavicci. “Is this going to help him?”

Calavicci took a minute before he shrugged. “If we can fix this—close down the offshoot—he won’t just forget what happened. But it might make it easier to process. Deal with.” He rubbed his forehead like he was fighting a headache—or remembering one he’d had a long time ago. “That’s going to take a while.”

Pooch balled his fists. “If he can even do it, right?” He thought about Jake and all the things the guy had spent a lifetime forgetting. “If he can stay sane long enough to try.”

“He will,” Cougar said firmly, standing up and dumping his plate in the sink. “He has us.”

Pooch watched him leave and hoped “us” was going to be enough.

*********

Carlos gripped a small bag in his good hand, worn out from a morning of walking—and not fast walking, either. Injuries were annoying and he couldn’t wait until he was back to normal. He settled his injured arm more firmly in its sling with a grunt of pain. At least his chest wound had already faded into a dull ache he could ignore most of the time.

He’d walked along the beach, just getting out and getting air and getting _away_ for a while. He loved his team and all, but he never did do well with close quarters living during downtime. He hadn’t left the house on his own since they’d gotten there, and he found at least some of his tension uncoiling as he listened to the sounds of surf and sand instead of the sounds of four equally tense men shuffling in the space around him.

Pooch left the safehouse when Carlos did, trying to respect Jake’s wishes and get the hell out of his way. Clay didn’t leave, which didn’t surprise anyone. He was keeping an eye on Calavicci, though he wasn’t trying very hard. Jake had bought into this fully and wasn’t waiting for the rest of them to jump on the bandwagon and honestly, Calavicci was so damned earnest that he was either the real, crazy, thing or an even better liar than Roque.

Jake himself was hiding, or had been when Carlos left. Yesterday’s violence had shaken him, obviously, but it wasn’t going away easily. Carlos hoped their discussion over Jake’s dinner last night had given him a way to help. He wasn't entirely sure he was doing the right thing, but he had the bag in his hand, so he was committed to the current course of action.

It was past noon by the time he trudged in the door, and he found Pooch putting huge chunks of fruit on a plate in the kitchen. Clay was sitting out on the lanai by the grill. He was facing the house, his gaze on the living room windows.

“‘Bout time you got back,” Pooch said, sounding almost cheery. “Calavicci’s talking to his computer in the living room. J’s sleeping again—or whatever.” Obviously Carlos wasn’t the only one who thought Jake was hiding.

Carlos nodded his thanks for the information. As he headed down the hall, he overheard Calavicci and his computer talking.

“ _The possibility exists that Dr. Beckett may not respond to attempts at communication, Admiral,_ ” Ziggy said. “ _If he has been mired in this offshoot for some time, it is likely he has been leaping without grounding. Certainly without contact._ ”

Calavicci sounded pained. “I know, Ziggy, but there’s got to be a way to get through to him.” His snort was clear and loud and frustrated. “ _If_ we can find him. Show me the probability web again for the Montserrat eruption. It’d be nice if that was the one. Hell of a lot easier than a nuclear bomb.”

Calavicci and his computer fell into silence and Carlos continued on. When he opened Jake’s door, he wasn’t surprised to see his friend wide awake and sitting in one of the chairs by the window. Jake was staring at the wall across the room, like he was trying to solve a particularly difficult math problem.

“Jensen?” Carlos called tentatively.

Jake jumped a little and hissed at the pain of the movement. “Hey.” He looked at Carlos seriously. “Pooch has a son. _Only_ a son, right?”

Carlos’s fingers tightened on the handle of the bag in his hand in an attempt to keep his voice level. “Yes,” he answered simply.

“Huh.” Jake’s face went blank for a long moment and then he shook himself, spying the bag in Carlos’s hand and smiling. “What’d you bring me?”

The childish, thoroughly _Jensen_ response almost scared Carlos for a minute before he reached in and pulled out his purchases. He silently handed over two bound notebooks, one bright orange featuring a touristy photo of a sailboat with _Antigua_ written across it in obnoxious script, and one plain black with a tiny gold shell in the lower right-hand corner. A pack of regular black ballpoints followed, and Jake held it all in his hands and looked up at Carlos, confused.

So, maybe not the best idea, then.

“You’re not a mind reader, I know,” Jake said, before Carlos could try to explain himself. “Because if you were, you would’ve had me committed, like, _months_ ago.”

“Years,” Carlos corrected him, smiling.

Jake stared at the writing supplies. “I was thinking about writing it all down. Writing is….” he trailed off, clearly unable to find the words he wanted.

“Less real.” Carlos understood completely. People _wrote_ stories. When you finished an op, you wrote reports that sanitized the horror. When you were deployed, you wrote letters to your family that said you were fine. Writing was mostly lies, after all. Memories were real.

“Not to get hopelessly sappy or anything,” Jake offered after a long moment, “but you know you’re the best friend a guy could have, right?”

Carlos didn’t answer because he knew Jake didn’t want him to. “Pooch is grilling.”

Jake took a deep breath that was nothing like the breaths he used to forget things, unfortunately. “Help me out to the lanai, and I might actually mean it about that best friend thing,” he said, placing the writing supplies very carefully on table beside him and lurching out of his seat. “I’m starving.”

*********

“Hey Spaceman,” Porteous called from the back door. “Chow time!”

Al sighed. He’d known, before Ziggy even brought it up, that there was a real possibility that Sam wouldn’t be able to see neural holograms in the offshoot. There was also a possibility that he wouldn’t respond even if he _could_. They had no idea how much time he’d actually spent trapped THERE, but Sam’s own initial hypothesis painted a grim picture. A person wasn’t made to live in a pocket of not-reality like that. Jensen was proof enough of the toll it could take on the mind. Sam might not even be Sam anymore.

And Jensen’s memories of the offshoot were already the stuff of nightmares. What was Sam going through living in it? Al could hope his friend was off somewhere away from the action, saving kids from speeding cars or something, but they had to hope he ended up close enough to one of the high-energy events for them to go in and convince him to get near enough to disrupt his leap. None of the events inspired anyone to go rushing _toward_ them.

“Pooch makes a mean grilled ahi. You don’t eat now, we’re not saving it for you,” Jensen announced suddenly. He limped into the room with Alvarez holding him up. He looked better. Not great. Not sane. But better.

God, this was one hell of a mess.

“I’m coming,” Al promised, standing and sliding the handlink into his pocket.

“Any luck?” Alvarez asked, watching the movement pointedly. He steered Jensen out to the table by the grill and Jensen settled carefully into the chair next to Clay.

“We’ve got it narrowed down to three key events, but there’s no way to get further without the right equipment. Ziggy keeps saying she needs to hook into the offshoot by syncing to Jensen’s neural patterns,” he said. Porteous started dropping plates of fish and fruit in front of everyone, and Al waved off the offered beer and dug into the meal. “Next move has to be trying to get into PQL.”

“Funny you should mention that,” Clay said, sipping his beer. Porteous sat down with a smirk. “I got a call this morning. Seems the CIA has taken an interest in why a defunct civilian-military project still has a full Air Force security detail and hasn’t had a damn thing moved off site in four months.”

Al stiffened. _God damn it—_

“Told you they wouldn’t do anything,” Jensen murmured, taking a bite of his fish and humming appreciatively. “You know those flyboys.”

“Some agent—Stegler?—is going to demand to talk to the Naval officer who was in charge of the project,” Porteous continued the story. Al took a long, deep, relieved breath and fought not to smile. “He’ll probably want a private tour of the whole place. With his own security contingent, of course.”

The smile burst through. “You black ops guys are damn sneaky,” he told them, adding sincerely, “Thank you.”

“How do we sneak the two of them in?” Porteous wondered, waving off the thanks and directing everyone’s attention to Alvarez and Jensen. “Coug we can pass of as a wounded soldier stuck on security detail, but J’s injuries are a little more than that.”

Al looked at the black and green bruise that decorated most of Jensen’s forehead around the bandage that covered his bullet graze. Add that to the bandaged hand and the limp…

“We’ve got ten days before we have to be in New Mexico. We’ll think of something,” Clay said confidently.

********

Jake spent his days trying to convince everyone he was fine, and most of the time, he actually sort of was, as long as he saved THERE for the notebooks and the nightmares.

Pooch and Calavicci disappeared to return the chopper the Admiral had borrowed, and Clay was trying to make himself scarce without going far enough away to actually accomplish it. Jake knew Clay understood that most of what happened in Brazil was his own fucking fault. He knew the guy felt guilty and he didn’t care. In the end, Max was dead and Aisha was dead and that was all good. He still wasn’t entirely sure if there was another Max out there somewhere, because even with the notebooks he used to separate HERE and THERE, things were pretty damned confused, so he didn’t think about it too much. If he thought about it too much he slipped and started remembering, and then he got mad, and that led to not being able to convince everyone he was fine.

Cougar just hung out and stayed close by because he _knew_ Jake wasn’t fine, and Jake could’ve kissed him for that, really. Well, for that and for the extra notebooks Cougs got him when the plain black one got filled up with THERE. The tacky one was mostly a way to remember HERE. In case he forgot. Luckily, since Pooch lived in both timelines, and Cougar and Clay weren’t letting him out of their sight much, it was easier to remember that everybody lived HERE.

The black notebook didn't help him forget THERE any more than the tacky one helped him remember HERE, but they gave him the illusion of control. Since he was pretty sure he'd only ever _have_ illusion from now on, he went ahead and ran with it.

Mostly, Jake focused on what he'd need to do to get the Admiral to PQL. He concentrated on learning to accept enough pain that he could walk normally, as long as the flaying site was tightly bound enough not to start bleeding again. The stitches on his hand had come out and it was beat up, but not particularly remarkable. The electrical burns were small and healing, and as bad as the knife wound was, he’d had worse. It didn’t hinder movement, so he tried to forget about it. The bullet to his forehead was really the biggest problem, he thought, staring at the wound in the mirror one morning.

“Maybe if I wear a big hat,” he mused. He avoided his own eyes, as he always did. It was one of those little things that ensured he didn’t go off the deep end again. Because really, if he didn’t try to figure out who was looking back at him, life was almost like before Max and Wilson and his battery and the torrent of memories that—

“A lieutenant’s cover should hide most of it, if you can stand the pressure.”

Jake jumped in surprise and turned to see Admiral Calavicci leaning in the doorway. He hadn’t known they were back.

“Pressure,” Jake said, rolling the word around his mouth. His jaw was completely back to normal, too, and he didn’t feel like he was talking around rocks. “Yeah, no pressure anywhere else in all of this, huh?”

Calavicci chuckled, then looked at him critically. “How you doing, Kid?”

"Great," Jake replied, sarcasm dripping from the word. He cocked his head to the side. That wasn't really fair. He honestly did feel better. He was even forgetting some of it—the easy things. "Actually, you were right." He gestured Calavicci out of the bathroom and headed for the lanai. "Writing it all out helps some."

The Admiral nodded, unconvinced. "Uh-huh."

Fine, so it also had him in a cold sweat half the time and so fucking angry he could murder most of the rest. But at least he could put it all in some sort of framework.

He grabbed a beer from the fridge by the grill and didn't bother to offer the Admiral one. He settled in a chair with a view of the house, because looking out at the sea reminded him too much of THERE. After Cougar died, after he and Pooch crashed the chopper as convincingly as they could and snuck their way back across the world to disappear here in Antigua, he'd sit for hours, staring at the sea. Thinking about how he’d fucked up.

His view peeked through into the living room, where Cougar sprawled on the chaise with his hat covering his face. That hat—Cougar had bitched a blue streak (well, for him; it was actually four words and they were all the same and rhymed with duck) about the smell and the blood from Brazil, until Clay had pointed out that Coug was the one who put it on the dead guy's head in the first place.

Funny how Jake could feel like he'd left Cougar to die and be so damn glad he was still here at the same time.

"Ziggy and I have been talking," Calavicci said, shaking him out of his thoughts.

"Oh?" He asked, though right at the moment, since his mind was insisting on playing back the part where he'd run and saved himself and left Cougar to glow in the dark, he didn't really care. "What about?"

"According to Sam's research, THERE shouldn't exist."

"We knew that," Jake replied flatly, still staring into the living room. Cougar moved, curling into himself for a second before the pain got to him in his sleep and he straightened out again. "Pretty fucking real for an imaginary place."

Calavicci leaned forward. "No, I mean THERE is a... It’s a construct of Sam's leaping. Theoretically, if we can get him out, it stops existing."

Jake sat up straighter. He refused to let himself hope for this, because he was already nuts and that would only make it worse, but God... "You mean ‘Poof! Now you see it now you don’t’?”

The Admiral shrugged. “Not sure it’s gonna be that simple—we still have to find Sam, get him to leap at the right time, and hope like hell this thing works..." He cocked his head. “Some timelines I only almost remember,” he said quietly. “Echoes. Maybe…”

Jake sat back, rubbing his leg so the pain of the injury blanked out a little of the pain in his head. “Yeah,” he whispered. “I won’t hold my breath.”

Because there was no way he’d survive that. He sat in silence with Calavicci as the older man stared at the sea and Jake stared through the thoughts in his brain.

How did you just erase a world? A life? Granted, a completely suck ass life, as it turned out, but… He couldn’t believe it would all go away. Just become a story in a black notebook with a tacky gold shell in the corner…

God, why couldn’t it be that easy?

“Hey, J.”

Because nothing in his life was easy.

"Jensen?"

He looked up, startled by the interruption to his thoughts. Pooch was sitting across the table from him, looking "concerned". Calavicci was right where he’d been, watching him subtly but understanding Jake’s need to just drift off into the shit in his mind. Pooch was obviously less patient.

"What?" he snapped back. He did _try_ not to, but it was one of those moments that showed how crazy he'd become and he really really fucking God damn hated those.

"Pack your bags," Pooch said. He was pretending he wasn't worried, which Jake didn't want to hate him for, but did. "We got a plane to Guadalajara at 2030 tonight. Rendezvous with Stegler tomorrow morning, then a closed flight to New Mexico from there."

Jake watched through the window as Clay and Cougar walked across the kitchen and to the lanai door. "Why's Stegler helping us anyway?" he wondered.

"I might've suggested that there were people who'd like to know why he knew so much about Max," Clay said as he came out and sat down. "Figured it might light a fire under him."

True. Max’s legacy was probably going to be pretty fucking spectacular when all was said and done. But that was something to worry about for another day. Clay was staring at him, and Jake held his tongue with difficulty.

“You might pass,” Clay allowed after long scrutiny. “If we could get you a hat.”

Jake snorted. “The Admiral over here was already trying to make me over into a Navy man with his dress cover,” he accused.

“Nah,” Clay said blithely, looking more relaxed than he had in a while. “We’ll stick you in a boonie, no one’ll notice the bullet hole.”

They all fell silent and drank what they were drinking for a minute. The calm before the storm and all that shit.

“Gonna be weird to be back in uniform,” Pooch said finally.

“Hopefully be a the last time,” Clay muttered softly.

Pooch looked at him like _he_ was the nutjob. “You serious? I thought you were all gung ho to get Stegler to clear our names, reinstate us, get it all back.”

Clay shook his head and looked suddenly very tired and very old. Calavicci and Cougar were watching just as closely as Jake himself was.

“Clear us, yes,” he agreed. “Then I just want to go the hell home.” He took a long pull on his beer. “World isn’t what it was, boys,” he stated. Jake bit his lip to keep from laughing because Jesus Christ that was so true. “Time to pack it in and call it good.”

Pooch thought about it for a minute. “Well, hell, you know I’m in for that. Go home, See my baby—”

“And your Baby,” Clay added with a smile. Jolene hadn’t been far from Pooch’s mind in the entire time Jake had known him and she wasn’t now.

Pooch smirked. “God, man, this ain’t the life I meant to have. I want something simple. Work in an autoshop or something.” He shrugged. “Wouldn’t pay much, but we’d get by.”

Jake hid a smile. Finally, the damned Aisha Contingency was gonna pay off. “I, for one, am gonna buy my sister the best house in Nashua and then I’m going to buy the one across the street, just so I can bug her all to hell on a daily basis.”

Clay chuckled. “With what money, Kid?” he asked. “You’re dead, remember?”

Jake nodded. “And so is Aisha.” Everyone was looking at him, so he looked at his beer. “Fortunately, she transferred a good chunk of her money into a new off shore account. Or four. Just a couple of days before she died, in fact.”

Pooch laughed. “You son of a bitch!”

A strategic sip of that beer was called for. "Just waiting to see if our real names go on the accounts. Numbers are so impersonal."

Clay had a dark look in his eyes again, and for once in recent memory, Jake was willing to extend him an olive branch. “Didn’t you always say you wanted to live on a boat on Nantucket?” His CO’s eyes softened as he recognized the not-quite-absolution-but-as-close-as-it-got in his grin. “She owed you, sir. We did take down Max for her.”

“Hey, man, _I_ took down Max,” Pooch cut in. “That entitles me and Jolene to at least a four bedroom with den and a brand new Range Rover, I think.”

“Four bedroom?” Cougar asked, finally joining the conversation. “How many more kids are you planning on having?”

Jake’s brain disengaged again. Pooch had a son. _Only_ a son. THERE was THERE and HERE was…

“...she gets the final say in that one, Pooch,” Clay was saying through the static. “After all, she’s the one having the kids.”

“And raising the kids,” Cougar pointed out.

_Two little girls, spitting images of Jolene…_

“Hey, kid.” Jake looked up to see Calavicci watching him with complete understanding.

He shook his head, just slightly, so the others wouldn’t notice. It was okay. It was… He shrugged for good measure. _It was_ , right? No changing it.

Unless, of course, they changed it.

“I’m gonna get packed up,” he said suddenly. He rose and ignored their concerned looks as he headed for his room, and he squashed a hope that doing this would make it all go away—or any of it, even. He couldn’t be that lucky. But it didn’t stop him wishing that the names Jasmine and Ashley would stop rolling around his brain.

************  
to be continued…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story of Jimena, Jake's lost laptop is told in Why I Hate Murmansk (labeled slash but not really).


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to send this out on Friday—late on Friday, but still, on Friday. Sorry. You get an extra day.
> 
> Also, this chapter tips me over **ONE MILLION WORDS** on AO3. Damn, people! Why you let me talk so long? (Thank you all so very, very much for reading!)

**Stallions Gate, NM**

Jake lounged against the chopper more because he was afraid he’d fall on his ass if he didn’t than because it played into the image of the bored military detail for the annoying senior official. He was recovering quicky, but he was still exhausted just standing upright. They’d found him the promised boonie and he wore the brimmed canvas hat low in front to hide his forehead. It was irritating as hell, and Jake wondered for the four-millionth time how Cougar stood wearing a hat _all the time_. Cougar had chosen, like an idiot, to remove his sling and pass himself off as healthy. Jake was going to razz him endlessly when the other man bitched about being sore later.

At ground level, Project Quantum Leap was a swooping concrete building made to fit in with the lines of the rocks and mesas that surrounded it. They landed close to what looked to be the main entrance, and the helicopter was met by a lieutenant and his security detail.

“Let the games begin,” Pooch crowed quietly, as Stegler and Calavicci approached the Lieutenant in charge. Calavicci was wearing civvies, of course, but had on his Navy bomber jacket with its prominent insignia. He walked behind Stegler, playing the slightly disgraced former overseer.

Stegler looked, if anything, _more_ uncomfortable in the desert heat of the southwest than he had in the jungles of Brazil. But he stood ramrod straight, and sold the review to the Air Force officer with an expertise Jake wouldn’t have thought he was capable of.

The chopper was far enough away to give them a vague anonymity, but close enough that the conversation at the landing field’s edge could be heard. The discussion was turning out to be lengthy, as the young man who was supposed to be in charge of boxing up and cleaning out the facility tried to talk his way out of why that hadn’t quite gotten done yet.

“I could bring this up with your commanding officer if you’d like, and you can explain yourself to her,” Stegler bitched in that officious way that only bureaucrats seemed to manage, “But right now, I want to see what the hell was going on in there and why nothing’s been done in the last four months to get this equipment boxed and researched. And I have the full backing of the Joint Chiefs to do it.”

Which was a total lie, but Jake figured they were entitled to lie a little to the government that had been making a habit of doing the same to them for… forever, really.

“Of course, sir,” the lieutenant finally agreed, looking browbeaten. “Would you like some of my men to accompany you?”

“No I would not,” Stegler replied, gesturing to the Losers. “I have my own people to protect me.” He hooked a thumb at Calavicci. “And unless they’ve been growing dinosaurs down there, I hardly think one elderly Navy man is going to be much of a threat, do you?”

Jake watched the Admiral refrain from choking at that. It was fun.

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant had had it now—he just wanted Stegler out of his face and into the facility. “If you and your men will—”

“Me and my men will do whatever the hell I damn well please, until the president himself tells me otherwise, soldier.” And with that, Stegler gestured at his _security detail_ and frowned impatiently as they made their way to the door Calavicci had moved to stand in front of.

Jake waited until they were inside to open his mouth. “Nicely done, Steg,” he complimented quietly. “It’s ‘my men and I,’ though.”

“Shut up, Jensen,” Stegler growled. He looked around the huge atrium. “Who the hell thought this was good use of taxpayer money?”

It was Jake’s turn to refrain from choking. Because the CIA was so frugal with it, right?

“The building itself was mostly private endowments, Stegler,” the Admiral said irritably, though Jake could see he was almost vibrating with the need to get to the heart of the place. “Don’t get your panties in a twist.”

“The building itself?” Stegler asked as Calavicci led them toward a bank of elevators. “Only the building? What about your equipment?” He watched the Admiral punch a code into a keypad and press his thumb to the plate above it. “What the hell did you do here, anyway?” he griped. “Colonel Clay was short on details.” He glared at the man in question. "And heavy on threats."

"Shoe hurts like a bitch when it's on the other foot, doesn't it?" Pooch muttered.

The plate above the keypad refused to light up, which Jake suddenly remembered it was probably supposed to do. That was what the panel he’d ripped out of the wall had done. Before he ripped it out of the wall.

“Did they wipe the codes?” Clay asked, strategically placing himself between the keypad and the entrance at the far side of the large space. “How the hell are we going to get in?”

Jake rolled his eyes and stepped forward. “Yeah. Too bad you didn’t bring a hacker with you. Oh wait—”

“Get on with it, Jensen,” Clay barked. If there was an edge of laughter to the command, Jake pretended not to notice.

It took a grand total of fourteen seconds to figure out that a connection behind the plate had come loose and sixty-three more to fix it. Calavicci was fuming by the end.

“Damn flyboys probably haven’t even tried to get downstairs.”

Jake watched the plate light up and listened to the elevator approaching from a very long way down, it sounded like. “Let’s remember that that’s a _good_ thing, right?”

Calavicci sniffed angrily. “They’ve been here for four months. The least they could have done was notice it was broken.” The elevator door finally opened and they all stepped in. The Admiral input another code, and this time the keypad and plate worked perfectly. The elevator ground down slowly and Jake’s ears popped as they descended.

“You want to see your tax dollars at work, Agent Stegler?” the Admiral asked, his whole demeanor becoming more animated as he neared his goal. “You better hold on to your hat.”

The elevator opened into a hallway that Jake knew well, and he fought to organize the memories swamping him. There was nothing but emergency lighting now, with the project power at a minimum, but he could see the place brightly lit in his mind’s eye.

“Why was the room blue, by the way?” he asked suddenly, throwing everyone off and garnering stares. “What? I forgot the place for five years and now I remember and I want to know.”

The Admiral smiled sadly. “That was Sam’s idea. Him and Beeks. They thought it would be soothing.” A door to the right of the elevator opened at Al’s hand on the sensor, and a large room greeted them. Jake walked in and turned around in the dim light, remembering the table, and the blue, and clocking Calavicci before running off to find Ziggy.

“Didn’t soothe so much,” Jake remarked off-handedly, walking out of the room without looking back.

He heard Calavicci’s wry response as he walked down the hall he’d run down the last time he was here. “I remember.” He continued speaking as Jake led the way through the complex. “Sounds like the Air Force has been their usual thorough self and managed to screw up mothballing the place.”

Jake walked up to a door he didn’t remember being there and touched the handplate next to it, watching the door slide completely into the ceiling to show him the room where he’d first met Ziggy. In '98, she'd clearly left the damn thing open for him to walk into her trap, the minx. “I’d say they’re as efficient as always,” he muttered, looking at the untouched consoles.

Calavicci clapped his hands once in satisfaction, and suddenly, this was his show. “Great! Jensen, you come with me to the main control room.” He glanced at Clay over his shoulder as they walked. “Once the main CPU goes up, power levels are going to spike and someone’s probably going to investigate.”

Clay nodded. “Pooch’ll watch the elevator—that the only entrance?”

Calavicci shook his head. “Northside exit is probably still operational—it goes straight to open air. And there’s an emergency egress just south of the reactor room in case of catastrophic failure, but it should be biometrically locked.”

“Can we not say catastrophic failure?” Pooch asked quietly. Cougar and Jake snorted in response.

“Can Cougar cover both at the same time?” Clay wanted to know. Jake felt himself relaxing as they all settled into a military mindset. Thoughts about whether he could make it in the real world with the white picket fence and his niece’s soccer games cropped up, but they'd have to wait for later.

“Probably,” Calavicci allowed, stopping outside another nondescript pneumatic door.

Clay looked everyone over and Jake smothered a grin as his boss completely discounted Stegler as a member of the protective detail. From what Jake remembered of Stegler THERE, that might be a miscalculation. He was willing to bet the old guy had at least a pistol or two hidden on him. “All right, Calavicci, get us a map and show us where to be. I’ll take the northside exit.” He raked Jake with a look. “This isn’t supposed to be dangerous, but everybody keep your head down.”

“I can only crouch so low, sir,” he offered lamely. Nerves were creeping in on him, and he wasn’t quite certain why.

Calavicci opened the door, showing off a darkened room dominated by a candy-colored platform that Jake figured must be the staging area for Ziggy’s laser matrix. The Admiral had tried to explain to him how the colored cubes subtly changed the matrix as the laser passed through them, but part of him was sure that Beckett just liked the science fiction vibe in his design.

Hopefully, he’d get to ask the guy once Beckett got back.

“All right, Captain,” Clay said, his frown half-hearted when Jake pretended shock at his use of the military title. “Keep us apprised.”

“Will do, sir,” he promised. He nodded to Cougar and then to Pooch as his teammates checked the map Calavicci brought up on his handlink, then separated and headed for their respective positions.

Jake watched Stegler stand in the doorway as the Admiral walked confidently through the dim light to a wall panel behind the colorful platform. The agent looked out of his depth and violently annoyed about that.

“So are you a hero now?” Jake asked him, shaking the man from his thoughts. Across the room, Calavicci sniffed in annoyance and pulled off another wall panel, looking for something. He’d placed the handlink on the platform, and it glowed faintly in the dark. “The man who brought in Max?”

Stegler growled in the back of his throat—which could actually have been a little menacing with some refinement. “I’m lucky I wasn’t killed in my sleep the first week,” he admitted. “But it looks like most of the rats have either abandoned the ship or been burned in the rubble. Nobody wants to be a known associate of the man who imploded a half mile of Brazilian rainforest.”

Jake hadn’t seen a television since Brazil, so his mind brought up a Russian news report detailing the massive earthquake in the gulf and the rise of New Jerusalem as a stand-in. Fucking THERE.

“What the hell’s going on with you, kid?” Stegler asked. There was no concern in his voice, just annoyance at yet another situation he had no information on.

“Got my brain fried,” Jake explained simply. “Makes me a little—oh hey look!” The lights did actually go on as he said that last, but he was planning on something crazy and disturbing anyway, so that was fine. Anything that made Stegler grunt in irritation was all good.

“Now we’re in business,” Calavicci announced as the platform hummed. “Reactor is ramping up. We should be able to begin downloading Ziggy back home in a couple of minutes.”

“ _Thank you, Admiral,_ ” Ziggy said, speaking for the first time since they arrived. The rest of her comment came not from the handlink, but from the system itself as the colored cubes began to glow more brightly. “ _It will be good to finally be in my native environment. We can begin now, as energy levels increase._ ”

Over the next ninety seconds one, then three, then ten lasers focused themselves upward into a mirrored space above them and created a rich miasma of pure energy. Jake looked up into Ziggy’s mind in awe. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re beautiful, Ziggy?” he asked softly.

“ _I have been told I have a winning personality, Captain Jensen,_ ” she replied.

Jake grinned. “That too.”

“ _Download will complete in 96.44 seconds,_ " she announced. A loud clank and increasing hum sounded from what looked like an airlock behind Calavicci. “ _Imaging Chamber neural interface undergoing startup diagnostic and evaluation._ ”

“ _Should the reactor be making this much noise?_ ” Cougar’s voice came through Jake’s earpiece, a shade of concern in his tone.

“Probably,” Calavicci answered absently. “Ziggy, where are we on output for the Accelerator?”

Jake looked at the steel door in the opposite corner from the Imaging Chamber. The Quantum Accelerator, the Admiral had explained, was where Beckett would appear once they got him back. _If_ they got him back. It was the most energy-intensive step of the whole process, and if Ziggy was right, they were going to need a huge amount of energy from THERE to extract him.

“ _Accelerator output is at 68 percent and increasing, Admiral,_ ” Ziggy told him. “ _Initial calculations indicate an elemental power reading of 230 percent, minimum, to affect extraction._ ”

“God damn it,” Calavicci grumbled. Stegler was beginning to look vaguely worried.

“ _Jensen, this thing is going to start glowing in a minute,_ ” Cougar hissed.

> _The explosion was as small as the device that made it, and Jake watched from a helicopter less than two miles away as his best friend blew himself to dayglo atoms. The searing nuclear light left him blind for a time. But not for long enough._

“ _Jake!_ ” Cougar barked sharply, the bite to it shaking Jake back HERE.

“It’s good, Coug,” he assured his friend. The live one. “You’re good.”

“Output should even out here in a minute, Alvarez,” the Admiral put in over the radio, a smile on his face as he seemed to take the first deep breath of air he’d had since they met. “Looks like you’re up and running, Ziggy."

“ _I am, Admiral,_ ” the computer said primly. “ _Welcome back to Project Quantum Leap, Captain Jensen._ ”

Jake smirked at the eyeroll the Admiral gave him. “Thank you, Ziggy.”

“Enough already,” Calavicci said. “Where are we, Ziggy?”

“ _I have been unable to lock on to Dr. Beckett in the micro-offshoot with the resources available to me before now._ ” Another two color blocks lit up and their lasers added to the light show as the room began to thrum with more energy. “ _Now that I have access to my primary systems again, I can begin a more thorough search, based on Captain Jensen’s neural matrix._ ” The airlock lit up and Jake looked at it apprehensively. The Admiral had said he’d have to enter the Imaging Chamber to allow Ziggy to access the secondary reality and pinpoint when Beckett would have to leap. “ _According to the Captain’s memories of the alternate timeline, I estimate the entire length of the offshoot to be approximately 3.69 years._ ”

Jake looked to Calavicci to explain why that was significant as the Admiral cursed. “You’ll have to start scanning at the beginning and go to the end.”

“For _three years_?” Jake asked, appalled.

Calavicci shook his head. “No, it goes fast, but…” He looked unbelievably apologetic. “It goes. All of it.”

Jake started to sweat. He was pretty sure there was no way he could do this. Not that he was going to give himself much if a choice.

The Imaging Chamber door opened, and Jake walked toward it without thinking. He could fix _something_ , right? He couldn’t fix himself, but God, if Beckett had been stuck in the Hell he’d been remembering… Didn’t _someone_ have to be rescued from it?

“ _Imaging Chamber diagnostics complete,_ ” Ziggy said simply. “ _Neural review and assessment will take a maximum of 18.4 minutes._ ”

Jake took a long shaky breath. “Colonel?” he called into his comms. “We’re gonna get started here. Estimate 20 minutes downtime.”

“ _Good luck, kid,_ ” Clay answered.

Jake nodded, and stepped into the Imaging Chamber, shuddering as the door clanked shut behind him and left him in a vast dark space.

“ _Step into the center of the room, Captain,_ ” Calavicci requested over the internal speakers. The lights came up slightly and Jake walked forward, watching as images seemed to coalesce before him. Not even before him. It was like he was there. Back in the Khyber Pass…

“I swear if I have to watch that guard walk round the wall one more time, I’m going to shoot him just for something to do,” Roque grumbled.

Jake whirled to find himself standing right on the edge of a cliff, Roque lying on the ground beside him, looking through a pair of high-powered binoculars. Jake jumped sideways so he was farther from the edge and found himself stumbling _through_ Cougar, who sat hidden in the rocks and held his ultra-long-range rifle in his hands.

“Fuck!” Jake whispered. “Okay, hologram. Got it.” He looked around and saw Pooch and Clay—and himself, sitting beside his field laptop. Damn, it all looked so _solid_! “Disturbing, but I got it.”

“Three days we’ve been camped out here, Colonel,” Roque continued. “And still no sign of Fadhil.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to wonder if that Agency prick knows his ass from a rathole,” Clay growled. “But the General seems to think he’s legit.”

“Fucking Max.” Jake looked up at Fadhil’s clifftop complex then back at his team, who sat waiting, unaware of him or of the tragedy they were about to be part of…

“ _Captain Jensen?_ ” Ziggy called through the speakers. “ _We have locked on to the offshoot—_ ”

“I noticed,” he replied cuttingly.

“ _I will commence scanning now,_ ” she finished, ignoring him.

The world sped up and his stomach churned as the images skipped around him. He could only be thankful that with the speed came silence. Still, his memory called up the horror in Coug’s voice as he demanded an abort on the airstrike; an abort that never came. They infiltrated Fadhil’s compound. Freed the children. Hiked. Loaded them up—

Jake closed his eyes and kept them closed, but the memories played inside his mind just the same.

“God damn it,” he whispered after a while, wondering where they were. Had they reached the Azores yet? That hadn’t completely sucked. Stupidly, he opened his eyes.

A second’s view of the bowels of Max’s New Jerusalem—himself standing with his back to Cougar, who lay sprawled against the wall, his hat on his head and blood running from everywhere as he cradled a bomb in his lap—and he was fighting not to throw up as he snapped his eyes shut again.

“Fuck,” he whimpered.

“ _I’m sorry, kid,_ ” Calavicci said quietly through the speakers. “ _I really am._ ”

Jake swallowed hard and kept breathing.

“ _Almost done, Captain,_ ” the Admiral finally told him encouragingly. “ _Two minutes._ ”

Two minutes. He could open his eyes, right? Cougar was dead. Once Cougar died, it was all over. All but the living. He literally couldn’t stop himself if he tried—and he didn’t try. He just opened his eyes and saw what he expected to see: himself, a beach, a gun—

The images shut off and left nothing in their wake. Jake stood shaking for a long moment before the door slid open and he turned, feeling the tears on his face, and saw Calavicci standing in the light beyond the darkness.

“We, um,” he cleared his throat, reaching up to rub the tears from under his glasses and freezing as he realized he’d done the exact same thing when he’d left Coug to die. He balled his hands into fists instead, feeling the healing skin on his hand tighten. “We done?” he managed to finish asking.

“Yeah, Captain,” Calavicci said, looking up at him sadly as Jake brushed past him into the control room. “For now. Ziggy’s turn to sift through the timeline.”

Jake just looked up at the lasers as they played in the ceiling. “She can fucking keep it.”

********

“ _Step one all done._ ”

Jake’s voice over the radio sounded rough and angry and unstable.

“Jensen?” Cougar asked, knowing Jake knew the question.

“ _Situation normal, Coug,_ ” Jake replied. All fucked up. “ _Ziggy says we hang tight for another ten or fifteen minutes before things start happening._ ”

“ _Sit rep, the rest of you,_ ” Clay asked, sounding as worried as Cougar felt.

“ _This hallway is damn boring, sir,_ ” Pooch announced.

“The reactor has stopped scaring the shit out of me,” Cougar replied, glad to hear Jake chuckle over the line. “Nothing else to report.”

“ _It’s dark here,_ ” Clay said. “ _’Bout as boring as your hallway, Pooch._ ”

“ _The flyboys probably haven’t even noticed we fired the thing up._ ” Calavicci sounded worried, too, and Carlos wondered who he was worried for. “ _Sit tight, everyone,_ ” he continued. “ _We’ll let you know when Ziggy comes up with something._ ”

Carlos sighed and leaned against the wall, staring at the door to the reactor for a minute, then switching his gaze to the bright red steel door at the end of the hall marked **EMERGENCY EGRESS—RADIATION SHIELDING LEVEL 5**.

Wasn’t the most exciting op they’d ever run, but it might be the most important.

He supposed he should just get comfortable and wait.

********

Stegler was getting antsy. Al tried to ignore his pacing and glaring and concentrate on the data Ziggy was spewing out. For his part, Jensen sat on the floor against the wall and stared into Ziggy’s matrix like it held the secrets of the universe.

Hell, maybe it did.

“How much longer is this going to take?” Stegler finally demanded.

“About as long as it takes,” Jensen replied, his voice flat and dead. “Maybe longer. Who the fuck knows?” The kid finally craned his neck to look at the older man. “What the hell do you care, anyway? You didn’t have to help us.” He went back to staring at Ziggy. “Could’ve left us to rot in Brazil.”

Stegler was silent for a long time and Al tried to concentrate on Ziggy, but he was curious about the answer, too. The CIA tended to just use people and toss them afterward. Stegler could have grabbed Max’s body, disappeared, and left Al to evac the Losers to God knew where. And why help them infiltrate the Project?

“Some of us pay our debts, Captain,” Stegler responded roughly. “I’ve been hunting Max for longer than you have, but you all managed to track him down when I couldn’t.” Al watched the guy’s eyes soften. “And what happened in Bolivia? Shouldn’t be the way the United States of America does business.”

Jensen snorted. “So you’re saying you did it all for love of country?”

Stegler grunted. “And because the USA needs more tenacious assholes like you and yours, yeah.”

A window popped up on the screen in front of him suddenly, and Al’s heart skipped a beat as he scanned the result. He hadn’t told Jensen, but he and Ziggy hadn’t even been sure they could lock onto Sam in the offshoot at all…

“Are you saying we can _target_ the contact?” he murmured, feeling Jensen’s eyes focus on him. “We couldn’t even do that when he was leaping _here_.”

Jensen stood up stiffly, his cut-up leg making the process slow and awkward. “Are you saying you found him?” he asked. He seemed torn between hope and sheer terror.

Al, on the other hand, was finally, _finally_ , seeing the light at the end of a very long tunnel that had started nearly a decade earlier. “I’m saying once we do, we can retrieve him the way he was supposed to be retrieved. Well, almost,” he qualified. “We still have to make sure we get him in the right place; time it right.” He looked at the power graph on the secondary screen. “The power is going to have to be enormous.”

“But…” Jensen asked leadingly.

“But if we do this right, we can get him back,” Al said, not quite sure he believed he was saying the words after all this time. “We can finally get Sam home.”

*********  
to be continued…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialog in this chapter came from the comic book. Did I mention the comic book is completely awesome and everyone should read it? Because, the comic book is completely awesome, and everyone should read it.


	15. Chapter 15

Jake sat against the wall again and stared up at the laser matrix, listening as Pooch and Clay discussed boats and housing prices in Springfield and who was better, the Giants or the Patriots? (And was that really a question? Because the answer was _always_ Green Bay.) The usual downtime prattle was soothing in its own way and he tried to soak it up and let it wash away the cloud of memories the neural scan had stirred up.

Stegler had decided to “get some fucking air” about five minutes ago, which was funny because all the air was canned down here. Jake radioed the team to let them know the agent would be wandering and Calavicci had Ziggy lock down anything more interesting than a broom closet. Even the bathrooms could be locked automatically down here, which was hysterical.

“ _Admiral, I have the optimal event calculated and have a lock on Dr. Beckett._ ” Ziggy’s voice shook him out of his stupor.

“Already?” Calavicci asked, surprised.

It did seem like that went awfully quickly. Jake looked at his watch. It had been less than fifteen minutes since Ziggy had started the algorithm that was supposed to scour the three-and-a-half-year bubble.

“ _Captain Jensen's memories of key events were very precise,_ ” she responded, flirting with him again. He dug up a faint smile in response. Yeah. Too fucking precise.

“Give me a break,” the Admiral muttered in response to the flirt. “Look, let's just figure out what we need to do to get Sam close to it, and we'll get this show on the road.”

" _Dr. Beckett is already in proximity to one of the high-energy events—making it optimal,_ " Ziggy said, causing Calavicci to suck in a surprised breath.

"You're kidding me, that's great, Ziggy!" He grinned at Jake. "What the hell are the odds? Maybe God or whoever is still looking out for him."

Ziggy continued without answering the odds question, which Jake appreciated. “ _Once Captain Jensen has located Dr. Beckett and assessed the situation—_ ”

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Jake called as he pulled himself awkwardly to his feet again. Fear froze his gut and he stared at the Imaging Chamber door like it was a gate to Hell. “No one said anything about me having to go back there.”

“Ah, yeah,” the Admiral began apologetically. “See, Ziggy figures, since you’re the one still connected to Sam, you’re the only one who can go in and contact him.”

Jake shook his head, which had started aching again with a vengeance. So fucking typical. “And you were going to tell me this when?”

The Imaging Chamber door whooshed open on that vast space and Jake looked back at the Admiral in anger. Looked like he really _couldn’t_ trust anyone not to screw him.

“Right about now?” the old man offered. At least he had the grace to look chagrined. “It’s the only way,” he said desperately. “We're flying blind here without his link to the Project. You're all we have, Captain.”

Jake took a deep breath, knowing (because not only was his life never easy, it was often just too fucking difficult for words) the answer he’d get to the question he was about to ask. “Which high-energy event was it?”

Ziggy answered because it looked like Calavicci couldn't bring himself to. “ _The nuclear explosion that destroyed the oil platform known as New Jerusalem and—_ ”

“Killed Cougar,” he answered for her. Because of course it was. He squared his shoulders and ignored the sweat that was beginning to pool against the bandage on his forehead. He wished Cougar was in the room—just so he could be reminded that the idiot was still alive HERE. He should be pitching a fit right now, but he was just… blank. Why the hell was this all on him?

>   
>  __”Shit, man, this is—That kind of responsibility, I dunno…” He’d looked at Cougar, frozen at the idea of taking down New Jerusalem once and for all. God, it wasn’t like they had much choice—if they didn’t do it themselves, the Sheik had no problem nuking the place out of existence. “What do you say, Coug?”_ _
> 
> “Okay,” Cougar agreed flatly after a long moment. He looked up into Jake’s eyes and Jake swallowed hard at the complete hopelessness he saw in that gaze. “And then I’m done.”

_And you were, too, God damn it. You never planned to make it out, did you?_ Jake took a deep breath, trying desperately to see that bright side that had kept him alive his entire fucking childhood. Who knew what he’d find when he got THERE. This guy Beckett had changed the world every other Wednesday before he got stuck in the bubble, right? Maybe Jake could magically save Cougar? Get Beckett to set the timer on the nuke, get Pooch to pick Cougar up and fly off into the sunset….

Maybe he really was becoming delusional. _Fuck it._

“What do I need to do, now?” he asked. Calavicci breathed a sigh of relief and Jake’s anger flared, making him wish he could just flatten the asshole and disappear. Funny, he hadn’t even realized that his anger was better since he'd walked into that chamber. Crushing pain and shock were great for making you forget to be pissed off.

Again Ziggy answered, her almost human voice soft and gentle. “ _Assess the situation and determine where Dr. Beckett is and the location and status of the nuclear device. By my calculations, if the retrieval program runs in tandem with the detonation, he should return here and the micro-offshoot should be healed._ ”

Jake nodded and tried not to throw up. Sounded completely batshit, so SNAFU, then.

Calavicci gave him the handlink, his face as hopeful and serious as Jake had seen it. The sight knocked his anger back a notch or four. The Admiral didn’t want to lose his best friend any more than Jake did. “The handlink will funnel Ziggy’s information to you. She’ll be able to see what you see, but she won’t be able to extrapolate beyond that in real-time, the way she used to—she can only show you what you're seeing now and what you remember of where you were before.”

“In the dark and up shit creek,” Jake said quietly, running a soft, appreciative hand down the face of the device. “Must be Wednesday.” _God, I don’t know if I can do this._

“Sam should, God willing, hear you and see you, but… we don’t know how grounded he’ll be. The personality of whoever he leaps into might bleed more now, without the Project as a buffer. He won’t be able to see or hear anything from here, by the way, so when you hear me talking over the internal speakers, he won’t.”

“Okay, then,” Jake drawled out. “This’ll be fun.” He opened a comm to the rest of his team, breaking into Cougar’s assertion that football was for pussies and _futbol_ (“soccer, you foreigner,” Pooch sniped good-naturedly) was a real sport. “Hey guys,” he said, trying to sound like this was just a normal op. “I’m going in to… you know… fix this. If I can.”

“ _ **You’re** going in?_ ” Clay barked back angrily.

“Yeah, see, that’s what I said, too, sir,” he replied, with a glare at the Admiral. “But it’s the only way, so… radio silence for a while.”

And there was.

“ _Good luck, J,_ ” Pooch called finally. “ _We got your back here._ ”

“ _Don’t get dead,_ ” Cougar said, which caused Jake to sputter out a laugh.

“Where I’m going, it’s not me dying that I’m worried about.” He looked through that open door into the cavern beyond. God, he didn’t want to see Cougar die again. “For me, it’s just like walking into a simulator.” _Of my worst nightmares._

“ _So don’t get dead,_ ” Cougar repeated, a smile in his voice that did more than he could know to bolster Jake’s courage.

" _God speed, soldier,_ " Clay told him—which totally should have sounded like a cheesy war movie, but just made Jake grin instead. " _Get this done and get back._ " The _to us, not crazy,_ went unspoken.

“Roger,” Jake replied. He turned to the door, and nodded to the main computer console. “Ready when you are, Ziggy,” he lied.

And then he stepped right into Hell.

**********

He tried to catch his breath, his skull ringing from the collision with Aisha’s forehead, and reached blindly for his M4.

“Don’t,” she spat, pointing her rifle at his head. She reached down and pulled a second radio out of her wetsuit. “Fahd—It is over. Stop the countdown. We will bring the nuke back with us.”

He looked over at Cougar, who sprawled on the other side of the room looking as dazed as he was, and closed his eyes to try to get himself together. The image of Clay, on fire and determined to take out Max, played over his lids...

“ _Roger that,_ ” came the thickly accented voice over the radio. Fahd. “ _I’ll meet you back at the pipe._ ”

“If I am not there in fifteen minutes,” Aisha said coldly, “it is because I am dead.”

They could only be so lucky. His brain played back what they’d just said.

“Nuke?” he whispered, incredulous. “You had your old boyfriend Fahd follow us in with the nuke?”

“Insurance,” she told him. “Failure seemed likely—they call you the Losers for a reason.” Aisha almost smiled, which was about as terrifying as she meant it to be. “But no matter now. Max is dead.”

“And so’s Clay,” he grated. “He trusted you! And when the moment came, you didn’t even _blink_ —you stabbed him in the back!” He rubbed his forehead and felt a tingle run through him as he did. It niggled at him, but he ignored the familiarity of the sensation. “You’d do the same to the rest of us,” he stated with sick realization as Cougar slipped across the floor to join him in the crosshairs.

“In a heartbeat,” Aisha answered. “Are you really so naive?” she asked.

>   
>  __“You’re naive, Kid. That’s your problem.” Al cradled his bleeding fist in a shaking hand._ _
> 
> “Not naive, Al. I just… everybody needs a second chance.” He grinned, handing the older man a length of paper towel to wrap his knuckles. “Even you.”

Aisha continued as he shook off the memory. They came and went—always had, it seemed—and he’d learned to forget them. “You were never anything more than a means to an end,” she was saying. “Max was the single greatest threat to the independence of the Middle East and you led me to him.” She re-aimed her rifle between his eyes.

“So that’s it?” he asked. He knew this would happen sooner or later. He couldn’t stay lucky forever, right? “You shoot us and it’s all over?”

“For you,” she replied. “For my people, the war goes on, until we are free of your air bases and your oil men and your phoney elections.” He could almost feel her finger tightening on the trigger, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from hers and the wild hatred he saw there. “Death to America.”

He closed his eyes, waiting for the shot to come. When it did, it wasn’t aimed at him and his eyes snapped open as Aisha cried out. He almost couldn’t process what he was seeing. From Cougar’s grip on his arm, neither could he.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” came that car salesman’s voice wrapped in insanity. He blinked but Max still stood before him, gun pointed at Aisha. “You can’t kill America,” Max told her. “I _am_ America.”

Cougar stood up and he did the same while Max’s guards regrouped. What the heck happened? He’d seen Max burn, right along with Clay… His anger suddenly boiled over. “Not _my_ America,” he barked, lowering his voice as Max’s guards tightened their grips on their rifles. “We’re supposed to be the good guys, remember? Give me your huddled masses and all that? _That’s_ what _we_ signed up for.”

> _“It doesn’t always work out that way," Al said, a quiet pain to his voice. "But that’s the way we wanted it. It’s why we signed up.”_

“You? You’re not America.” If he was going to die here, he was going to die truthfully. “You’re just a self-serving monster in a silk suit.”

Max wasn’t fazed in the least. “You want to be a good guy, go hug a tree.”

> _“Being a good guy ain’t all it’s cracked up to be sometimes, kid. You don’t always get to save the day.”_

Max swung his gun around to aim it at him and Cougar. He saw Aisha begin to make a move out of the corner of his eye. “Good guys lose.”

Aisha’s knife flew fast. “Not good,” she growled. “Not a guy.”

Max’s trigger finger came off in a spray of blood. While everyone was distracted, Cougar slammed an elbow into the nearest bad guy, while he broke another's nose, and they each grabbed a rifle to open fire on anyone who moved. They were alone now but the last of the Losers would go down fighting.

“Don’t let them get away!” Max screamed over the gunfire.

Aisha ran for the door to the balcony that ringed the rig and most of the guards followed her with their bullets, letting him and Cougar take down a bunch of the rest.

She dove for the ground four floors below without a thought for the rope that held her. He tucked himself into the space between the boxes, feeling Cougar at his back while he peeked around their dubious cover to watch Max direct one of his men.

“Cut it!” Max bellowed, pointing at the rope Aisha had tied off somewhere above them—the rope she was counting on to save her life. “She doesn’t have enough line to reach the ground.”

The line snapped under the force of the mercenary's blade. Not that that would necessarily stop her. This was Aisha after all. “Cougar,” he whispered, “we need to get out of here.”

Once she fell, or whatever, Max seemed to realize that the remaining good guys weren’t under fire anymore. “What do I pay you for? Take the little fuckers out!”

Their cover began to come apart with the liberal application of automatic weapon fire. “Anyhow—OW!” He resisted the urge to slap a hand over the spot where a bullet had sliced through his arm on the way past. “Any bright ideas?”

A clunk and rattle he recognized from too many times in the past sounded beside him and he reached out a hand, hoping it didn’t get shot off before he could grab the live grenade and lob it back at their attackers. He didn't see Max—he was probably in the wind by now, headed to safety while his me cleaned up after him. How had he survived Clay?

The grenade went off to a chorus of shrieks and the smell of burnt flesh. He pushed Cougar hard to get him moving. “They’re down!” he called, running for the door. “Now’s our chance—GO!”

“Cougar, don’t!” The voice that yelled his partner’s name was his own, but he hadn’t spoken. “Damnit, Beckett, TURN AROUND!” _Beckett?_

Obeying the command in the voice without really understanding, he spun, brought his rifle up, and fired as the muzzle cleared Cougar’s back. He almost pulled his finger off the trigger when he saw the bullets go straight through… him. Him, but dressed in Army fatigues, a boonie on his head.

The bullets passed through his doppelgänger and left a shiver in his own skin. There was a gurgling curse behind the image, and it moved out of the way so he could see Max, pain and outrage frozen on his face, slide to the ground, dead from the hail of bullets he himself had just let loose.

Cougar turned to look at him, a betrayed, if relieved, look in his eyes. “He was _mine_ , Jensen.”

The other him shook his head, a smile so bright on his face it almost hid the image’s tears. “His gun would’ve jammed,” it said. The image looked beyond them at something he couldn't see. “It’s over, right? Max is dead, so…” It caressed a sleek black device in its hand—

>   
>  __Al slammed his hand against the handlink and it yelped. Al jumped a little in response. “You had to make an interface that feels?”_ _
> 
> He smiled in response. “You have to keep taking your frustration out on machines?” he asked, remembering how he'd met Al, beating up a box that refused to give him a candy bar.
> 
> Al grumbled, hit the handlink a second time, and made the colorful device squeal again. “Vending machines don’t talk back.”

_Beckett._

_Sam._

He looked up at the image ( _hologram_ ) of Jake Jensen and felt the world shift around him, leaving him dizzy and weak. “You’re not Al,” he whispered, memories trying to trickle past the mind he was currently inhabiting. It felt like a very long time since he'd known who he was.

“What?” Cougar replied—at the same moment that Jake Jensen shook his head and said, “He’s here, though. Couldn’t come through.”

It was like the void between leaps and the leap itself merged for a moment. He remembered—some anyway. Enough to know that, though he was in this body, the real owner was, inexplicably, standing insubstantial before him.

And then it was gone. Most of it. But the sense of _him_ remained.

Sam— _Sam, right?_ —nodded. Cougar was still looking at him and he was suddenly unsure of what to do next. He’d known a minute ago. He almost laughed at his own insanity. He'd been Jake Jensen a minute ago.

“Right,” the real Jake Jensen said, and again it was as if he was talking to someone Sam couldn’t see. God, that looked familiar.

“Jensen,” Cougar asked him quietly, stepping toward him and gripping his arm. “You okay?”

“Okay, Dr. Beckett,” Jensen said at the same time. “We have, like, zero time to go over this shit, but trust me. Calavicci says to tell you you’re in an offshoot and we’re trying to get you out, but it’s going to take some work. First, we need to get Cougar off this damn rig—” He was suddenly talking to someone else again. “—Yes, we _do_!”

“We need to get out of here,” Sam told Cougar, his mind reeling as his memories tried to seep through. An offshoot. That would actually make a lot of sense. If… The thought fled like a butterfly. He remembered this feeling, too. Al used to be good at guiding him through the… Swiss cheese? Was that what Al called it?

Cougar shook his head and brought Sam’s attention back to the present. “What about the nuke?”

“I know,” Jensen was saying to that someone else. Was it Al? Sam wondered. “I am not going to watch Cougar—Shut up, okay?” He looked at Sam, and Sam suddenly realized that Jensen was injured. His forehead was black and yellow and a bandage covered at least a third of it. Another wrapped around the hand holding the handlink-that-wasn’t-a-handlink.

“Dr. Beckett, listen,” he began again. “We—”

“JAKE!”

Sam was slammed to one side without warning as a hail of bullets sprayed the room. He could see nothing but Cougar’s chest, where his friend— _Jensen’s_ friend—was covering him with his own body.

“No! Cougar, fuck it! NO!” Jensen’s voice was pure agony and again, Sam reacted. He shoved Cougar off of him, bringing his automatic rifle up. There was no one not worth shooting anymore, and the scruffy man in the doorway went down as Sam fired until he ran out of bullets. The duffle bag Fahd—that had to be Fahd, right?—had been carrying fell to the floor, the spiked ball of a nuke rolling halfway out before it got caught on the zipper and stuck there. Sam just froze in shock at the proceedings.

“Damn it, Cougar," Jensen whispered sadly. Sam looked up to see the man he was supposed to be, staring beyond him. Sam turned around and hissed as he did. He’d been grazed by another bullet but he barely felt the pain in his side as he knelt beside Cougar, who lay face-up, staring at him with a vague frown.

“Damn it, Cougar," Sam echoed. He wondered if he sounded exactly like Jensen had. His mind insisted he knew this man, that he was his best friend, even though he was slowly remembering that he was alone in the void and knew no one. He remembered Al now, vaguely, and almost recalled the feeling of having his trusted presence at his back. It must have felt like the bond between these two men before him.

Cougar coughed and Sam saw Jensen approach out of the corner of his eye. The image knelt beside them and reached out to touch his friend, hissing when his hand passed through. “Fuck it,” Jensen moaned.

“You okay, Jake?” Cougar asked roughly, oblivious to the pain he was causing because of the pain he was in. “Didn’t see the fucker until the last minute.” He tried to turn his head toward the doorway and let out a broken whine. “Fahd, huh?”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “We got him. It’s okay.” He put one hand on Cougar’s left shoulder and the other on his hip, all the while watching Jensen try to keep it together. “Let me turn you over, all right?” he asked. “See how bad you’re hurt?”

“Bad,” Cougar confirmed. He moaned when Sam pulled on him carefully and looked at his back.

Jensen cursed roundly and Sam sucked in a breath. Cougar was bleeding badly. He’d taken two shots high up, and while it looked like his shoulder blade took one of them, the other had gone straight through and he was oozing from both sides—Sam realized with a sick feeling that it was probably the same bullet that had his own side burning. The two hits to Cougar’s upper thigh were more of a worry and the way they were bleeding, Sam hoped neither had nicked an artery. He looked around for something to staunch the flow of blood and ended up grabbing a rag that stuck out of a dead guard’s pocket. Dirty, but all he had. He tied off the leg as best he could, but the rag was going to be soaked through quickly.

“You'll be okay,” he assured Cougar, though he locked eyes with Jensen when he said it. It wasn’t exactly the truth, but if Jensen was here to help—it crossed his mind that it was good to have someone who was here to help again—it didn’t have to be a lie. “We’ll get off this thing and get some help. You’ll be fine.” He gave Jensen a more significant look. “Right?”

Jensen shook himself, starting and then aborting a move to wipe the tears away from beneath his glasses. “Um, yeah. Right. Listen, about that…”

********

“ _Pooch is headed back,_ ” Jensen was saying, his voice tinny and a little fragile over the intercom as he explained the situation to Sam. From the one-sided conversation, Sam seemed to be okay, thank God, and to understand the situation. The worst case scenario obviously wasn’t going to be a problem since Sam still had enough sense of self to respond to his own name and accept that the man he was supposed to be was actually standing in front of him. “ _Max is dead, we have the nuke. We just have to wait._ ”

“What are you doing, kid?” Al muttered. He didn’t turn on the intercom to ask, though, because he knew the answer—they'd had the conversation before Alvarez was injured. Jensen had been through leaving his best friend to die once before and he'd made it clear he wasn’t going through it again. Even if, theoretically, the reality and the Cougar that lived there weren’t going to exist once they got Sam back.

“Ziggy, is there a chance delaying the retrieval will mess this up?” He wanted Sam home more than anything he’d wanted in a very, very long time, but unless he had to, he wasn’t willing to risk Jensen’s sanity to do it.

“As I am unsure of the goal of Dr. Beckett’s current leap, I cannot say,” Ziggy returned. She paused to run scenarios. “I believe if Dr. Beckett’s goal had been to eliminate Max, however, he would have leaped already.”

“So what is it?” Al mused. “Save Alvarez?”

“ _God…_ ” Jensen’s voice was torture to hear. “ _Fuck, all right. You've got to get him out of here. Up to A Deck—elevator’s back that way._ ” Al heard the quality of Jensen’s voice change and knew the kid was talking to him now. “ _How close does he have to be?_ ” he asked desperately. “ _Pooch should head for New Jerusalem when he doesn’t find any of us at the rendezvous._ ”

“Calculating,” Ziggy said quietly.

“Hang tight, kid,” Al told him, trying to take his own advice. “You get up to the A Deck and we’ll go from there.” He closed the intercom connection. It was unfair that Jensen was having to go through all of this.

“Ziggy,” he asked carefully. “You’re sure Captain Jensen can’t be affected by the influx of energy into the Accelerator?”

“Captain Jensen is connected to Dr. Beckett, not to that system, Admiral—just as you are still connected to the Accelerator, but are in no danger because you are no longer connected to Dr. Beckett.”

Al glared at the door to the Accelerator. “Twist the knife, why don’t you?” he growled.

********

Jake was glad that Beckett was busy all but carrying Cougar and that Cougar couldn’t see him, because he couldn’t stop crying if he wanted to. He’d been so sure he’d saved him this time—Max was dead, damn it! They should have been able to figure out the timing of the bomb and gotten Cougar to safety… Fucking Fahd. He’d clearly taken the initiative to come looking for Aisha and found him and Cougar instead.

Well, Beckett and Cougar. Damn, it was weird to see someone who was him-but-not-him. It was like he could see Beckett shimmering around the edges of his own face when he looked at the guy. And did it all have to look and feel so freakin’ _real_ , by the way?

“Come on, let’s go. A little further,” Beckett was saying, trying to haul Cougar toward the working elevator halfway across the oil rig. Coug was bleeding again—hadn’t really stopped. Jake wondered if Beckett could risk the radio to try to get Pooch there sooner.

“Jensen…” Cougar sounded like he had when it was Jake himself dragging him toward the pipe to freedom. Jake remembered trying to convince himself Cougar could somehow keep it together enough to get through the pipe without passing out or dying or… “Need to stop,” Cougar whispered.

“Soon, Cougar, I promise,” Beckett soothed, hefting Cougar’s weight more securely. “We’ll get you fixed up and we’ll be done. Just like you wanted.” Jake swallowed as Beckett shot him a look that said he’d somehow been party to Cougar’s decision and knew what it meant. “Max is dead this time. We'll...”

“Not getting out of this one, Jake,” Cougar muttered brokenly. "You don't have to go down, too."

“Shut the fuck up, you crazy Mexican asshole,” Jake replied. Cougar couldn’t hear him, he knew, but he couldn’t help but say it anyway because God _damn it_!

“We don’t have to go far, buddy,” Beckett told him, ignoring Jake’s outburst with what seemed like long experience. The duffle bag full of nuclear bomb bounced awkwardly against Beckett's hip and Jake realized he was still waiting for an answer from Ziggy about that. “Pooch’ll be here any minute.”

Cougar laughed and spat blood and Jake was pretty sure he was going to throw up all over the Imaging Chamber soon. “Jake, I know you’re a dreamer, but—”

“ _Alpha 12, channel 5,_ ” came a tinny but recognizable voice over the short-range radio hooked to Cougar’s increasingly bloody shirt. Beckett had obviously lost his somewhere along the way.

“Pooch?” Cougar whispered, shock blanking his features. Jake chuckled wetly at the look. It was pretty much his own response when Pooch had shown up in the original timeline.

“Beckett,” Jake called quietly, “switch over to channel 2.”

“Not 5?” Beckett asked, causing Cougar to give him a confused look but nothing more. He was just too far gone.

“It’s an in joke,” Jake said shortly. There was no time to explain.

Beckett reached out and took Cougar’s radio. The moment he switched it over, Pooch came through clearly. “ _—the hell are you Losers?_ ”

“We’re here,” Beckett replied. Jake watched Cougar cough and wheeze and spit blood. “We need evac.”

“ _I hear you, J,_ ” came the gratifying reply. “ _Status?_ ”

Beckett locked eyes with Jake. “Clay’s dead. Max, too.” He took a deep breath and hoisted Cougar higher against his side. “Cougar’s in bad shape.”

Pooch cursed quietly across the line. “ _Understood. What’s your position?_ ”

“Still on the rig. Headed to A-Deck,” Beckett said. Jake walked ahead of him as they approached the one set of elevators that had been working when he was here.

“I’ll be down and waiting—if they don’t shoot me all to hell,” Pooch replied with a muted shade of his usual in-op humor. _Yeah, well, that could be a problem,_ Jake guessed.

“Tell him to strafe the control tower and the deck,” he coached, watching Beckett repeat his words for Pooch’s sake. “There shouldn’t be many of them left, as I recall.”

“ _Jensen?”_ Calavicci’s call was almost shocking after the eerie silence and hushed voices on the rig. “ _Ziggy, um… Well, Ziggy says he’s going to have to be close to the blast._ ”

“How close?” Jake whispered back, fearing he already knew the answer. Never fucking easy. Never.

“ _He’ll have to be on the rig when it goes._ ” Calavicci said it all in a rush, like he couldn’t stand to hear the words leave his mouth.

Jake walked away from Beckett and Cougar and cursed an almost silent blue streak to get himself back under control. “Seriously?! Pooch isn't going to leave me on an oil rig in the middle of the gulf with a fucking _nuke_ , Admiral,” he hissed.

“ _Ziggy says it’s the only way, Captain,_ ” the Admiral responded. He clearly didn’t like it any more than Jake did.

Jake covered his face with his hands and rubbed hard, using the pain that shot through his injured hand and head to focus him. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, _shit!_ All right.” He turned to Beckett and Cougar, who were waiting for the elevator to arrive.

There was a way to do this. A batshit, nothing to lose, might as well die trying way to do this. A sane person would never go for it, though, so he was going to have to hope Beckett was as crazy as he was.

Beckett didn’t ask him what was happening, but he’d clearly been through this with Calavicci before and was watching him closely. The entire rig shook with weapons fire from above and Jake held his breath until silence reigned and the radio came back to life.

“ _Pretty sure they’re all bugdust up here, guys,_ ” Pooch called, as the elevator opened before them and Beckett dragged Cougar in. “ _Where the hell are you?_ ”

“On our way,” Beckett replied, eyeing Jake warily. He wasn’t going to wait much longer for an explanation. Jake took a deep breath and talked.

“We’re gonna have to be a little… radical… here,” he began. As he laid out the plan, he looked more at Cougar, who had pretty much passed out now, than he did at Beckett. He couldn’t watch the guy come to the same conclusion he had. Willingly jumping into the path of a nuke was nuts, even for Jake.

Calavicci cursed him over the intercom once, but Jake knew he had to see the wisdom in the plan—fucked all to hell though it was.

Beckett listened carefully until Jake ran out of words.

“Okay,” he said simply.

"Okay?" Jake replied. Beckett sounded enough like Cougar going after Max to shake him for a second. "Wait, really?"

“Really.” Beckett shocked him further with a tired, hopeless look that was way too comfortable on the shimmering version of his own face. Beckett then lowered Cougar carefully to the floor of the too-damn-slow-moving elevator, and bent down to put a shaking finger on the priming button of the bomb. “How long?”

“Um… ten minutes?” Jake guessed. Fuck, this guy really was nuts. "You guys ready there?" he asked Calavicci.

"Yeah, yeah," Calavicci said tensely. "I hope to God you're right about this, kid."

"Ten minutes," Beckett confirmed blankly. He punched in the time and looked up at Jake.

"Mark," they both said as Beckett pushed the button.

" _Timer's going here, Captain,_ " the Admiral assured him.

“What if it doesn’t work?” Sam asked, hauling up a now-unconscious Cougar and dragging him out of the elevator the second the doors opened. There was no time for Jake to answer. Pooch was right there, grabbing Cougar’s free arm and looking Beckett over for damage. Beckett made sure to leave the nuke where it was and Pooch had his arms too full with Cougar to notice.

“What the hell happened, J?” Pooch demanded, pushing them both to run to the still-warm helicopter.

Beckett shot Jake another look. “It’s a long story,” he said shortly. “We need to get out. There’s a nuke—”

“Stegler told me,” Pooch broke in as they climbed into the helicopter and laid Cougar out. “Stupid ass bitch and her Jihad. Aisha better hope she ends up dead at the bottom of the fucking sea."

Beckett grabbed the flight med kit and began slapping pressure bandages on every one of Cougar's bullet holes. Cougar was stirring, and Jake prayed he didn’t remember any of this later.

Shit, he prayed this whole reality would just disappear in a mushroom cloud in… He looked at the handlink. “Seven minutes,” he said aloud. “Pooch needs to be a minimum of a mile and a half out.” At least, that was how far out they’d been the first time, when it blew.

“Get in the air,” Beckett commanded, pushing Pooch toward the cockpit. “I’ll take care of Cougar. We don’t have a lot of time.” He checked Cougar’s pulse as the chopper lifted off and nodded in satisfaction. Which Jake took to mean that Cougar would live.

“ _Ziggy says she thinks that’s it, Captain,_ ” Al said over the earpiece. “ _Pooch and Cougar should have enough time to get to safety before it blows and Cougar would survive the injuries if…_ ”

“If any of this really happens,” Jake finished for him. He looked down at the rig as the chopper rose above the main tower, trying to get altitude to aid their speed as they escaped. Jake looked at Beckett, who was watching him closely.

“What if this doesn’t work?” Beckett repeated, this time quiet and cold and scared.

Jake snorted hopelessly. “Then I will have killed someone else, and you’ll have saved a guy who deserves to be saved.” He hung his head. “I’m so done with this shit, Dr. Beckett,” he whispered. He remembered the look on Beckett’s face from earlier. “I’m pretty sure you are, too. Don’t you just want it to be over? Don’t you want to just stop having to fix it or live with it or live through it?”

Beckett's eyes—Jake’s own eyes, sort of—filled with acceptance. And still with the fear. “Al thinks this’ll work?”

“ _It’ll work, Sammy,_ ” the Admiral murmured gently over the comms though he couldn't have heard Beckett's question. Jake wished Beckett could hear the longing in his friend's voice.

Jake nodded. “It’s our one shot,” he said sincerely. He looked down at Cougar, who was shaking a little with the pain, as his eyes opened and fixed on Beckett.

The man who looked just like him walked to the open door of the chopper, the wind whipping his bloodstained clothing, turning everything else into dust devils around him. Jake stood next to him, the wind something academic to him, since he wasn’t really there. He looked down at the rig, now small and slightly broken in the dried up seabed around it.

“ _Three minutes, Captain,_ ” the Admiral said, his own voice shaking. “If Porteous punches it now, they’ll make safe distance, easy.”

And they were high enough above the rig that Beckett wouldn’t hit before the nuke went off. Jake smirked—because wouldn’t it suck to turn Beckett into a pizza right before they tried to pull him back? “You ready to go home, Sam?” he asked softly, causing Beckett to snap his head up and stare at him.

Beckett's face softened with a longing Jake almost knew. A longing for home and sanity and all this shit being just _done._ “Hope I’ll get to see you in person, Captain Jensen,” he whispered. “Pooch!” he shouted over the sound of the engines, “Go! NOW!”

And then Sam Beckett jumped from the open door of the chopper just as Pooch kicked it into high gear. After a few seconds, Beckett spread his arms and legs to slow himself down, and Jake wondered if, just for a second, Beckett wasn't actually enjoying his flight.

He stood frozen in place on the helicopter, watched Sam fall, watched Cougar try to drag himself to the door…

watched the world turn white—

*******  
to be continued…


	16. Chapter 16

Sam Beckett hit the ground hard. Every inch of him hurt. Every nerve sang. Every desperate pant was like breathing glass. He’d been flying—even enjoying it in a horrible sort of way—before he felt the leap take him and the familiar terror of the void. Then the world had exploded in a flash of pure white he’d seen once before and he was thrown sideways to end up… Here.

“Sam?”

He knew the voice from long, long ago. Too many images assaulted him—a punk kid who hadn’t killed the woman they said he had, a shocked, betrayed soldier, left to rot in the jungle, a drunk beating the crap out of a vending machine, a friend helping build a dream, a partner crowing with success as a laser shone in the night… Other images collided with those truths—a proud papa, giving his daughter away at her wedding, a toast to his wife of thirty years...

“Come on, Sammy,” the voice cajoled, tears in the words. Firm hands took hold of him, forcing his chin up. “You with me, Kid?”

Sam smiled, his mind singed at the edges, his body exhausted. He remembered. Oh God, he remembered _everything_. He smiled and looked up and croaked one word at the shadow he'd resigned himself to never seeing again.

“Al.”

Al’s face was wet but his eyes were shining. “Yeah, Kid,” he whispered. “You’re home.” He cleared his throat. "You've, uh... you've been out for a while."

Sam tried to get up, feeling remarkably whole for a man who’d just jumped out of a helicopter and into a nuclear blast. When he’d done it, it had been the only choice, and he was frightened to realize that on a very deep level he hadn’t cared whether it worked or not. He could understand the reason now. “Ziggy used the energy from the blast to boost the retrieval program?” he asked, smiling as Al helped pull him to his feet and then into a long, long, _long_ overdue hug.

“ _The nuclear detonation was more than sufficient to obtain a solid lock, Dr. Beckett,_ ” Ziggy answered for herself. Sam felt tears prickle at his eyes. God, he’d missed home. He remembered what seemed like years of convincing himself he didn’t, but…

“I’m home, Ziggy,” he murmured disbelieving. He grinned at Al, who was rubbing his eyes but would never deny his tears, and then he gripped his friend’s shoulder to be doubly sure it was solid, because the last time Sam had been home, Al had switched places with him to get him there. But Al was solid. Sam was _here_ … “I’m really home.”

And that was the moment the lights went out.

*******

“ _Captain Jensen?_ ”

Jake shook himself, blinking away the afterimage of a nuclear flash he’d lived through before, and found himself in the huge empty cavern of Project Quantum Leap's Imaging Chamber. Something was different in his head. He didn’t know what—he didn’t really _feel_ any less crazy—but there was a different kind of pressure battering at his mind...

“ _Captain Jensen, are you all right?_ ” Ziggy asked.

Jake yanked off his glasses as he ran a hand over his face. The movement hurt like hell and his eyes were full of tears—situation normal these days. “Did it work?” he asked, his voice a mere croak. He took a shuddering breath as he shoved at that final vision of Cougar’s desperate, horrified crawl toward the chopper door as Beckett fell toward New Jerusalem. He wanted it in the closet with the rest of THERE—which hadn’t gone away, damn it, and was shifting in his skull like shrapnel in a wound. “Is he home?”

Ziggy sounded so satisfied, Jake could almost think she was human. “ _Dr. Beckett is in the Accelerator. He is unconscious, but his vital signs appear normal. Admiral Calavicci is with him._ ”

Jake’s chin dropped to his chest. _Thank God._ At least something was looking up. The Imaging Room door slid open and Jake settled his nerves, switching on his mic as soon as he was clear of the shielding. “Hey guys! Come on, now, tell me the truth,” he called, forcing energy into his voice. “You miss me?”

The words were familiar, THERE words, but the memory was muted somehow... Maybe that was what was happening. THERE crawling into a hole to die? He chanced a hopeful grin.

“ _Like fungus,_ ” Pooch replied, though Jake could hear the relief in his voice.

“ _Don’t tell me you actually fixed the whole damn thing already,_ ” Clay bit out, sounding proud and relieved and happy, for once. " _Might be a record, even for you._ "

“Well, I can’t fix everything, Boss,” he said blithely. “I mean, Cougar’s still ugly, right?”

Jake tensed in the sudden silence.

“Coug?” _No. No, no, no..._

“ _Cougar, sound off!_ ” Clay barked, fear working its way into his voice.

The lights went off with a bang of sound and Ziggy’s laser matrix went dark. It took a long second for the emergency lights to kick in.

“Ziggy, what the hell is going on?” Jake asked, hoping at least some of her functions were still available through the handlink. He got only a dark screen and silence, so he grabbed his sidearm from the table by the main console and checked his clip. “Ziggy?” he tried again. He bit down on a curse. “Dark here, sir,” he called out. “We are electronically blind.”

“ _On it. I’m headed to the reactor,_ ” Pooch called over the comms. “ _I’ll let you know status when I get there._ ”

“ _Jensen, consolidate,_ ” Clay said. “ _I’m headed your way. Pooch, you don’t find Coug, you get your ass to the control room. We'll deal with the lights later._ ” Jake could hear his CO's breathing change as he ran. “ _Where’s the Admiral? And where the hell is Stegler?_ ”

Stegler? “Fuck.” God damn spooks! “You don’t think Stegler did something, do you?”

“Of course not, Stegler’s an idiot.” Out of the half light came a voice that threw Jake’s new-found hope for sanity right out the window. “And, of course, he’s a little tied up at the moment.”

Max—yes, fucking _Max_ —strode into the room with Stegler, bound and gagged and pissed as hell, limping ahead of him as a shield. Max’s pistol was in his right hand, his left arm wrapped around Stegler’s chest, his useless left hand under the other man’s armpit. Stegler had a bullet hole in his upper thigh that was ruining his cheap slacks as it bled.

Jake instantly had his gun trained on the motherfucker—too close to the top of Stegler’s skull—and shook his head at his own stupidity. There had been _two_ Maxes THERE. Just because he was batshit, didn’t make the memory any less real. Either that, or he really had gone all the way around the bend, in which case he was taking Max with him—this one, and every other Max he came across.

“Where’s Cougar?” he bit out, watching for that one second of relaxation. He wasn’t a crack shot by any means, but at this range he could blow Max away with minimal collateral damage if he timed the shot right. Clay gave a whispered curse over the comms and his breathing changed again as he increased speed. Jake’s mind pulled up the map to the place. Clay was a long way off.

Max tilted his head—but not enough to make a decent target. “Where he dropped, probably,” he answered carelessly. “Unless the dead can walk.”

“You sure as fuck can.” Jake tightened his grip on his gun, swallowing his fear. God damn it, he was sick of this shit. Exactly how many times was he going to have to deal with losing his best friend? He seriously weighed the price of blowing Stegler away in the bargain here. The old man would probably say it was worth dying for.

Max passed it off as nothing. “Well, some of us are born lucky that way.” He looked around, careful to keep Stegler between him and Jake, and moved away from the door to find himself a defensible position. Shit—now there was no clear shot from the door, either—Clay wouldn’t be coming to the rescue. “Project Quantum Leap, huh?” Max said, looking around. “Not quite what I expected. It’s sort of garish, isn’t it?”

Jake just kept his mouth shut and waited for an opening.

Max continued his conversation of one. "Do you know, I had to have three different people killed to find out what a retired admiral and our friend Stegler might possibly have in common?" He tightened his grip on Stegler and brought his arm up so he cut off the old guy's breathing for a second. "You haven't been much of a team player, have you, Marvin?"

Stegler's eyes said, "Go to Hell," but Max couldn't see them.

"Time travel," Max said bracingly, easing off on the pressure. "Not as far-fetched as it seems, is it? I was surprised I hadn’t been informed of this one—physics are sort of my thing, you know."

Jake really wanted to just shoot. Damn conscience.

“Oh come on, Captain Jensen,” Max said, exasperated. “You’re smarter than the rest of them—you understand what they could do here.”

 _Only too fucking well._ Jake purposely didn’t look toward the Accelerator door. If it was like the vault door on the Imaging Chamber, Calavicci and Beckett would be trapped inside. Out of the line of fire and of no use whatsoever. _Great._

“Let me tell you a story.” Max leaned into Stegler without showing himself and Jake cursed inwardly. He was never gonna get a fucking shot. “Once upon a time, I had a friend in Afghanistan named Fadhil.”

“Pretty sure Fadhil thought you were a dick,” Jake spat back. “You put a hit out on him.”

Max conceded the point with irritation. “Well, yes, after he abandoned his operations in Afghanistan and set up shop in Bolivia and then refused to help me finance what really was going to be one of the greatest endeavors the human race has ever seen.” He shrugged. “I had to.”

Stegler was recouping some energy, it looked like. His eyes were brighter and now fixed on Jake’s face, but he kept his body soft and floppy, making Max work for it. Jake didn’t dare take his own eyes off Max, but he felt better knowing Stegler would be with it enough to, maybe, help out a little when the time came.

“Anyway,” Max resumed. “What would have happened if my dear friend Fadhil had been persuaded to stay in Afghanistan and sell my opium—which, by the way, sells better, has a higher profit margin, and just plain gives a better high than heroin?” He yanked Stegler back and Jake tensed, waiting for the old man to fall. But Max had too strong a grip on him.

Where the hell _was_ everybody!?

“I’ll tell you what would have happened,” Max said, sighing at the past he couldn’t change. “I would have changed the face of the Middle East and 75% of the oil in the world would be under the control of the good old US of A.”

Shit. New Jerusalem… _A past he couldn’t change._

“The Project never worked,” Jake said quickly. “You know that, right?”

“Of course it did, Captain,” Max replied, sounding like he was talking to a child. “If it didn’t, Admiral Calavicci wouldn’t have brought you all here.” He cocked his head again, and Jake considered whether Stegler would mind missing an ear. Just an ear. “Why _did_ he bring you here?”

“Forgot his keys,” Jake quipped back. He had to duck immediately, as Max brought his gun up lightning fast and opened fire. Jake felt a smack of metal enter his left shoulder as he dove, his never-healed thigh raising a protest as he scuttled behind Ziggy’s platform.

“I never liked you, Captain Jensen,” Max sighed, sounding bored and significantly more crazy than even Jake was. “You think you’re funny, I get that. But all the quips and the one-liners—” Two sharp shots sounded from across the room, and Max dropped, losing his hold on Stegler and grabbing his left arm as his pistol went sliding toward the Imaging Chamber door. “ _Damn it!_ ”

Jake swung his gaze to the main doorway, expecting to see Clay, but it was empty.

“You all right, Kid?” came a soft query from the other side of the room. Admiral Calavicci crouched in the doorway of the Accelerator, gun still trained on Max. He rose carefully, not sparing Jake a glance.

“Yeah,” Jake replied shakily as he rose and trained his own sidearm one-handed on the psychopath in the corner. He could ignore the bullet in his shoulder for a second. Maybe. Fuck, being shot hurt! “He killed Cougar.” _Again._

No, no THERE, Cougar lived. Jake could still feel his brain reshuffling around that fact and the crushing ache of it almost made him forget the physical wound. _So much for happy endings._

“I wouldn’t have had to kill _anyone_ if you could all just stay dead like normal people,” Max growled, leaving his good hand clamped on his opposite arm, which was bleeding steadily.

“Pot, meet kettle,” the Admiral muttered, causing Jake to spit out involuntary laughter. A tiny sound behind him had him whirling toward the door, leaving Max to the Admiral and coming face to barrel with Clay’s glock. Both men nodded and lowered their guns a minute.

“Pooch, what the hell’s the sit-rep?” Clay growled into the comms.

“ _Nearly at the reactor, Boss,_ ” Pooch said. He cursed over the air. “ _I got one… three bodies. Reactor room’s open. No sign of Cougar._ ” A burst of gunfire could be heard. “ _Fucking—_ ”

“Pooch!” Clay barked.

The comm went dead and Jake tried to keep from losing it. The anger that had been held at bay by the push to save Beckett was back again, flaring red hot at the asshole who started this whole fucking thing.

Clay ground out a curse and trained his weapon on Max, looking like he was fighting the urge to shoot him between the eyes. “Why the hell is he still alive, Jensen?” Jake realized Clay was giving Max to him and his finger slipped back onto his trigger.

“No idea, sir,” Jake replied, turning back to Max and leveling his sidearm at the bastard’s unprotected head. Some urges were meant to be given in to. “I was about to fix that.”

“Ah-ah-ah!” Max said smugly, holding up his totally _not_ useless left hand to show them the blinking remote he had in it. Jake felt Clay stiffen behind him. “Perhaps you should rethink that. Unless you want to be at ground zero for the first successful snuke test on American soil—it’s a dead man’s switch this time, Colonel Clay,” he added. “No heroics and no shooting me in the brain, all right?” He cocked his head, considering his options as he watched Calavicci pull Stegler out of the way. “Maybe we’ll hang this one on the Iranians. They’ve been making noise about having nuclear weapons.”

Jake chanced a millisecond look at the Accelerator door, but the room beyond was dark. He hoped Beckett was okay in there. Someone should make it out of this, right? He shoved the idea of Pooch and Cougar to the back of his mind. He’d make Max pay for them. Somehow.

“What the hell do you want, Max?” Clay asked, moving to pick up the asshole’s pistol and raising it so he was aiming two guns at his head.

Max thought about the question in that bugfucked crazy way he had. It made Jake think maybe being snuked was worth putting a hole in his head. “Well, obviously I want to kill the man who killed my brother, but it sounds like maybe my men have already taken care of that.” Jake gritted his teeth at the too-true dig. Twins. Fuck. Well that explained the functional hand and the miraculous resurrection. “And I _really_ want you all dead.” He looked at the Admiral, who had just tied off the wound in Stegler’s leg with the agent’s ugly-ass tie. “But first I think I want to have a discussion with Admiral Calavicci here on the possibility of a little revisionist history.”

Calavicci looked up at him with defiance in his eyes. “You can get stuffed, you jerk.” He looked around in the semi-darkness, though what he was looking for, Jake had no idea. “Besides, you probably fried the computer with that blackout.”

“I’m not that stupid, obviously, and neither are you,” Max said patiently. “I merely shut down the reactor for a while so we could talk. I’m sure your artificial intelligence will be just fine.” He glanced up at the mirrors on the ceiling. “Laser matrices. A good idea, really. Compact, yet powerful.” He sighed. “Back to the subject at hand.” He advanced on Calavicci and Stegler, looking surprisingly menacing for a man holding only a remote in his hand. “Let’s talk about Afghanistan, 1998.”

Three things happened so quickly that Jake almost didn’t process the end result. Stegler swept Max’s legs with his one good one at the same moment that a blue-clad streak launched itself from the Accelerator and landed on the now prone psycho—who, sad surprise, pulled out a small gun he’d obviously been hiding in his friggin’ shorts or something, and started shooting.

Beckett, the blue-clad streak, slammed to the side, his groan of pain augmented by Calavicci’s cry of outrage. Jake looked for a shot himself, but was distracted by the horror of the kill switch sliding, unencumbered, across the room.

Everyone held his breath as it skittered to the wall and bounced off, the red light stubbornly on and the bunch of them surprisingly _not_ snuked out of existence.

“Well, that’s disappointing,” Max commented into the waiting silence. He raised his gun, training it on Jake (and why was he always the first target?) and his finger started to squeeze the trigger as Jake’s did the same—

—Max’s whole body was blown back by a combination of Jake’s bullet to his chest and a rifle shot to the head. Fired from the ceiling.

Jake sagged in exhaustion and ended up sitting abruptly on the floor. It was more relief than anything else, because only one crazy Mexican fucker was going to make a shot like that.

“Thank you, Cougar,” he whispered. He fell onto his back and stared up at the ventilation shaft, where Cougar, who looked mostly whole except for the bloody rip in his shirt and the bandage that peeked through beneath it, dropped heavily to the ground right beside him. Jake closed his eyes and reached up with his good arm, smiling faintly when he felt Cougar clasp his hand.

“De nada.”

*********

Sam closed his eyes and sucked in a careful breath.

“Sam?” Al’s panicked voice had him marshalling his strength and he opened his eyes again and nodded encouragingly as Al slid across the floor to kneel beside him.

“I’m okay,” he promised. A flare of agony shot through him from the bullet that was clearly still lodged in his side, and he groaned. Which really ruined the effect of his previous statement.

“No you’re not,” Al grumbled, balling up one of his brightly-printed handkerchiefs and squeezing it over the wound with breath-taking pressure. “Damn it, Sam, that wasn’t what I meant by ‘be ready for a distraction.’”

Sam smiled faintly. “Sometimes you have to work with what you have.”

“Oh sure,” came a pleasantly disgruntled voice from the hallway. “You don’t even wait for me before you close the deal.”

Pooch walked in with a wary eye on Max’s body. He was unhurt and knelt beside his friends to start fussing over Jensen’s wound.

“You should run faster,” Cougar said mildly, sagging back in pain as Jake’s attention was drawn away by Pooch’s first aid. Without fanfare, Clay moved slightly so that his legs were there to prop the younger man up.

Sam sighed contentedly at the scene. He knew all of them, intimately, like he’d spent years of combat at their side. Like he _was_ Jensen. The sensation would fade—it always did when he entered the void, at any rate—but for now, it gave him a powerful feeling of rightness to see the four of them together. The team they should be.

“How the hell am I going to explain all this?”

Jensen chuckled at Stegler’s annoyed question and Sam and Al both grinned as Pooch tied off a pressure bandage around his friend’s shoulder. Jensen looked exhausted, but less haunted and hopeless than he had during Sam’s last leap.

He almost laughed out loud at that. _Last leap._ God, he was home!

“I think explaining how Max had an…” Jensen stopped himself and the rest of the team tensed up. Sam wondered why and noticed that they all relaxed as he continued. “Can you say someone had an evil twin if the person was evil in the first place?” He looked to Pooch for support and the black man rolled his eyes with a relieved smirk. “I mean, do you think one of them was ever the good twin? Like, did one of them turn the other one evil? Like spooky twin brainwashing?”

“Jensen, shut the hell up and let me think,” Stegler ground out from his place on the floor.

“Why don’t we talk about why Pooch and Cougar are alive,” Clay suggested.

“You damn well better not be complaining about that,” Pooch said gruffly.

“Max was never very good at making sure we were dead,” Cougar said simply.

“And aside from the fact that Cougar scared the ever-loving shit out of me when he yanked me out of the line of fire in the reactor room, Max’s lackeys took about ten minutes for the two of us to clean up.”

“Okay. How about why we haven’t all been snuked out of existence?” Jensen offered as a topic. “Max had that dead man’s switch in his hand. I was sure we were dead.” Sam didn’t remark on the fact that Jensen didn’t sound like he would have been all that unhappy about the possibility.

“Yeah, bummer you didn’t have a mechanical engineer around who knew to cut the friggin’ green wire—oh wait!” Pooch said testily, glaring at Jensen in a way that said _he_ hadn’t missed the tone of voice, either. “Seriously, guys, I can go back and reset the damn thing if you want me to? I don’t gotta take this shit.”

Sam felt Al freeze at the same moment he did. Their eyes met and Sam quirked a sad, tired smile. “We could.”

“Ya think?” Al asked, not at all dubiously.

Sam looked at the Losers and then at his best friend. He’d spent what seemed a lifetime fixing other people’s problems and he knew he’d done a lot of good. He thought of his brother Tom and of the leap he’d taken when he left the Project behind. Al and Beth—and children. _Okay, so maybe not just_ other people’s _problems._ But the fact that someone like Max could use the same technology to create a world like the offshoot he’d been stuck in for God knew how long…?

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I think.”

**********

They took their time getting out, though by necessity, not preference. Beckett’s wound hurt like a bitch, apparently, but wasn't nearly as bad as it looked at first—the bullet actually slipped out of what was basically a long, thick, tunnel of skin while Pooch was cleaning it. Stegler was as tough as Jake remembered him being THERE, and sat stoically off to the side, watching everything. Cougar was being Cougar: stupid and macho, ignoring the fact that he’d been shot because right now the mission came first. Jake was surprised to find he barely felt the hole in his own shoulder, but that might be mostly because his brain seemed to be trying to re-partition itself and that was a motherfucker of pain.

Seriously, how did computers handle it?!

He’d ask Ziggy sometime, he thought, smiling. Pooch and Al had left the wounded with Clay long enough to fire the reactor back up and Ziggy was preparing to slip out into the internet again. The handlink blinked to life as soon as the lights went back on and Beckett all but snatched it out of Jake’s hand to get a look at the design.

“Did you build this?” he asked, running a hand carefully over the glass front. The face was pressure sensitive, and Beckett spent a long minute playing around with the simple interface.

“ _Admiral Calavicci and I collaborated in the design,_ " Ziggy said.

“ _Al_ did this?” Beckett said incredulously.

“Hey, I _was_ an astronaut, Kid,” Calavicci snapped good-naturedly as he and Pooch walked back into the room. “Who the heck do you think kept Skylab going? The monkeys?”

“Upload to CERN at 65%,” Ziggy announced, as if she was trying to forestall an argument she’d heard one too many times. Jake wondered what the early days of this project were like. There’d always been a part of him that had wanted to be that computer genius in the crazy lab. Funny how a kid from parents so violent they literally could help but kill each other felt like making a difference in the army was more important than making a fortune in the private sector.

He looked into the laser matrix. “I bet CERN isn’t this sexy,” he said, returning the smile Beckett sent his way. “You could always start over,” he said, unsurprised when Beckett shook his head.

“I’ll find a place for Ziggy,” he said confidently. The confidence sloughed off quickly. “Somehow.”

Jake looked back at Ziggy’s brain. “What you need is a good, solid investor.”

*********

Clay looked at the mess of them as they congregated in the atrium. Bunch of Losers plus three, he thought with a smile. But at least they were all there, right?

“Everybody ready?” he asked.

Jensen settled his shoulders and whined in pain as the dumb ass move jostled the bullet. Kid looked about two seconds from collapse, but Cougar wasn’t a whole lot better and they were both on their feet, so Clay was going with it. “Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

Clay snorted, shook his head, and opened the door. The seven of them—Pooch with Max’s body slung over his shoulder—faked a panic you couldn’t really feel when you were the one who’d set the bomb to go off.

“Lieutenant!” Clay shouted, putting every ounce of _we are up shit creek here, soldier_ into his voice that he could. “We need an immediate evacuation! One mile radius. NOW!”

The lieutenant who’d been browbeaten by Stegler just that morning looked at the old man who clung to Clay’s shoulder trying to look as pathetic as possible—or was really about to pass out, which was going to piss Clay off completely. “What happened?” he asked in shock.

“Your men missed an infiltration is what happened, Lieutenant. We barely got out with our lives—” (That actually wasn’t a lie.) “—but they managed to compromise the base.” He got up into the youngster’s face and hoped Jensen wasn’t smirking behind him. _De Niro who?_ his mind poked at him. “If we don’t get everyone out of this valley, we are dust. Do you understand?”

The kid got it. Finally.

“Sergeant!” he shouted. “We have a failed infiltration with system compromise. Proceed with immediate evac, now!” To their credit, his men quickly and efficiently began to marshal their forces at the helipad. They had three big birds, plus the dinghy Pooch had flown in. Plenty of room to evacuate the skeleton crew.

The lieutenant looked back at Clay. “Sir, I suggest you get your men and the Agent here to safety. We’ll regroup at Kirkland for debrief.” He looked at the building in a way that made it clear he knew there was a nuclear reactor in the damn basement. “So we have a Faded Giant? Should we call NucCom? What about civilian authorities?”

“The reactor is nearly a mile underground, son,” Calavicci reassured him. He looked back at the above-ground building with something like regret. “We’ll lose the building to the sinkhole, but the fallout should be well-contained.”

Because a snuke didn’t leave any fallout. The sinkhole _would_ be impressive, though, as a quarter-mile sphere of land would simply cease to exist. “Get your men out, Lieutenant,” Clay told him approvingly. “We'll deal with the safety concerns once we're all safe. Lift off in eight minutes, maximum.”

He dragged Stegler along with him to the helicopter and was glad when they were far away enough for the agent to stop pretending and get his feet under him. Guy weighed a ton.

“So where are we headed?” Pooch asked. “Antigua didn’t suck, I guess.” The resignation in his tone was painful and Clay looked at Stegler, who nodded in response to the question he had to know Clay was asking.

“Kirkland Air Force Base,” he told his men, watching Jensen and Cougar exchange a shocked look. Pooch just stared at him, like he couldn’t believe Clay was doing this. “It’s time to go home, Losers.”

Pooch’s face broke into a smile Clay hadn’t seen since Jerome was born. He jumped up into the bird to help settle the wounded. “Heard and understood, sir,” he whispered, satisfaction thick in his voice. “Heard and fucking understood.”

 

The snuke was set to detonate in ten minutes. As ordered, every bird was filled and in the air in eight.

Clay sat in the co-pilot seat and looked out at the concrete swirls that made up the topside of Project Quantum Leap. He hoped Stegler could come through for them. If not, they could always disappear again. Jensen, the sneaky bastard, had seen to it that they'd have enough money to do whatever the hell they pleased. Except get their names back. Their lives, their reputations. If Stegler could do that for them...

"Detonation in thirty, sir," Jensen sounded at the absolute end of his rope—that blank, cold nothing in his voice that meant the reserve of constant energy that fed his genius brain was finally dry. God, what the hell were they going to do with that kid? "Hey," Jake spoke again, rallying slightly. "Anyone know a good Italian place in Albuquerque? Not that I don’t love Latin food, but—”

“Do not make any jokes about salami, pepperoni, or any other God damned sausage,” Pooch growled.

Clay smiled. Somehow Jensen would be all right. They'd make sure of it.

Jensen himself gave the countdown, which was somehow appropriate. "Five. Four. Three. Two..."

The ground below them crumbled, the air around them shook. The building slowly, majestically, collapsed into itself as a crater simply appeared to devour it whole.

"Outstanding," Clay murmured.

Pooch made an incredulous sound in the back of his throat and opened a comm to the main body of choppers. "AF295 this is UAR62. Headed for Kirkland. Over."

"UAR62, acknowledged," the lieutenant replied, his voice small and desperately scared. "Headed home."

"About God damned time." Clay just hoped they made it.

*********  
to be continued….


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So very sorry for the delay on the end of this story. Life here as been a bit like Jake's life THERE and I'm doing the best I can.
> 
> Also, you can be confused if you want by Sam's memories in this one and how they fit into the rest of the story. It's proof that, in time travel, things are weird. The differences are not mistakes and you'll understand them in Chapter Eighteen.

> “ _—the hell are you Losers?_ ”
> 
> Pooch’s voice was angry and scared, and while Sam knew the memories weren’t his own, he remembered too many times when they’d all left their transpo expert wondering where the hell they were and if they were still breathing, only to have him save their butts as he swooped in on whatever he could hotwire, fly, or drive. 
> 
> “We’re here,” Sam replied. Cougar coughed weakly, and Sam felt the wetness of what was probably blood spatter across his neck. The through and through bullet had done more damage than he thought. “We need evac.” 
> 
> “ _I hear you, J._ ” Their resident white knight (“black knight, man!” Pooch railed in his head) paused a moment, as if he was afraid to ask the question. “ _Status?_ ” 
> 
> “Clay’s dead,” he stated painfully. He looked up at the hologram of the man he was pretending to be and saw that Jensen had somehow _also_ lived through that horrifying scene. “Max, too.” He settled Cougar more firmly against his side, the whine of pain from Jensen’s best friend more felt than heard. “Cougar’s in bad shape.” 
> 
> “ _Fucking… Understood. What’s your position?_ ” Pooch was pulling on the reserve of what Clay once called his pissed-all-to-hell energy. It was the thing that got him to look past the fact that they were all up a creek—so he could steal the boat that would get them out of there. Though Sam knew _he’d_ never heard it before, he was never more glad to hear it now. 
> 
> “Still on the rig. Headed to A-Deck.” _I hope,_ he thought, looking ahead to where Jensen led them. The man-he-was-supposed-to-be was barely keeping it together in the face of Cougar’s injuries, which was understandable, but... Something was going on that Sam’s Swiss-cheesed brain wasn’t grasping. The nuclear device bounced against his hip, weighing him down far more than Cougar was. 
> 
> “ _I’ll be down and waiting—if they don’t shoot me all to hell._ ” 
> 
> Jensen snorted at Pooch’s almost light-hearted comment. “Tell him to strafe the control tower and the deck.” 
> 
> “If you strafe the control tower, you should get most of them,” he told Pooch. 
> 
> “There shouldn’t be many of them left...” 
> 
> Hearing Al—no, _Jensen_ —talk under him, muttering information Sam needed to pass on, was so familiar and achingly missed that Sam stumbled as he dragged Cougar along. 
> 
> God, he missed home. 
> 
> The way Jensen suddenly turned away from him to talk to himself was also familiar. He couldn’t hear the whispers, but he could see the anger and frustration in the lines of the other man’s back. Sam listened to Cougar wheeze in his ear and prayed the elevator would hurry. Finally, Jensen scrubbed his hands hard over his face and turn toward them with a look of despair that was even deeper than the one he’d started with. The way he squared his shoulders told Sam everything he needed to know. 
> 
> _I always knew one day I wasn’t getting out of this alive._ Sam took a settling breath, the memories of the void and the endless leaping and the isolation swamping him for a moment. There were times when he actually didn’t mind the idea of not getting out. In the hell he’d been living in since the bright white light threw him sideways, there’d been a couple of leaps he _hoped_ he didn’t survive, in fact. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of them. He had a very real feeling that this leap was more important than any one he’d taken since he’d turned his back on the Project. The elevator rattled toward them as the rig shook while Pooch strafed A Deck. 
> 
> “ _Pretty sure they’re all bugdust up here, guys. Where the hell are you?_ ” 
> 
> “On our way,” he replied as he dragged Cougar into the elevator. He was unconscious, but he was still breathing, thank God. If they could just get him off the rig, he might make it. 
> 
> Sam just stared at Jensen, not bothering to ask whether that was even the plan. 
> 
> At least Jensen didn’t try to pretend. “We’re gonna have to be a little… radical… here,” he said quietly. He watched Cougar breathe and continued. “Cougar and Pooch need to get clear of the rig.” Jensen gave him an apologetic look. “If you want to get out of this, _you don’t._ ” He started pacing, and Sam was again reminded that the man wasn’t well. He limped unevenly as he explained. “We need you close to the energy of the bomb to get you back, but we need Pooch to take off with Cougar—which of course won’t happen because he’s not going to just leave you here, right?” No. Pooch wouldn’t leave him. “But if we can get him to think he’s rescuing you, too, then we can get Coug in the chopper, patch him up a little and maybe he’ll actually survive this time.” Jensen flicked his gaze up to Sam, but couldn’t keep contact. “It might make sense to you right now—or, you know, not—but you need to be on this rig to get home. And you can’t stay, so you’ll have to come back.” Jensen flinched like someone had hit him and Sam had a sudden memory of trying not to respond to things Al said during a leap. Was Al out there now, talking to Jensen? The nervous man took a huge breath and said all the rest in a rush. “Which you can do if you set the bomb to detonate and leave it here and get Cougar to the helicopter. Pooch’ll evac straight up like he usually does, so once he’s clear you can… sort of… jump out of the chopper before the bomb blows and they can get to safety while you…” He petered out. “Get home. We hope.” 
> 
> It was, possibly, even more insane than some of his own ideas. It was suicide in a real, concrete sense. 
> 
> It was a chance to get home. Sam thought back on what he could remember of the time after that flash of light that cast him into wherever he was now. The world was dark here, the people he helped—when he was able to help them—weren’t better off, not really. How could they be when the world around them was so unrelentingly twisted… 
> 
> Maybe this _was_ one of those times he didn’t mind the idea of not making it to the next leap. 
> 
> “Okay,” he said simply.

  

Sam opened his eyes to the dry air of New Mexico. Home. He couldn’t help the laughter that bubbled up past the hopelessness of the dream he’d just slid out of, and looked out the window of the secure medical room he’d been locked into last night. The bars couldn’t hide the fact that it was a beautiful summer morning and he was _home._

He needed to sit down and really talk to Al. And Ziggy. They hadn’t done more than just recoup their energy in the chopper, and once they got to Kirkland, Al and Agent Stegler had been marched to General Markerson’s office (and while Sam had never met Markerson, he remembered Al commenting on the man’s open derision of “that crazy Navy experiment” called PQL). He and Cougar and Jensen had been taken under guard to the medical wing, while Clay and Pooch were escorted to a secure room of their own. 

He had no idea whether Ziggy’s handlink had been confiscated or what had really happened, beyond the very sparse briefing that Al and Jensen had given him about how they’d found him and why Jensen had been able to get him back. He wanted to know everything, to understand how he’d been trapped in the offshoot and how he’d connected to Jensen in the first place and why the young man looked like he’d been through Hell and was still mired there. 

But first he had to get out of this room. 

Feeling the pain of the bullet wound from the day before, he rolled to a seated position on the edge of the bed and took stock. He knew he was in for a whole battery of tests, given the fact that he’d been missing for more than six months (at least in this timeline) but physically, he felt okay. Mentally though, it was like half his lasers were misaligned. Memories clashed and clamored and fought for attention, and too many of them weren’t real anymore. 

As it had when Al had taken his place in the accelerator years ago, his mind insisted on trying to catch him up on everything that had happened. Ever. Back then, the things that had _un_ happened faded gracefully into storybooks in his head. The pain of some of his leaps still stung and the guilt still burned, but he knew which memories comprised the current reality. 

This time, it was like the bookshelves had fallen to the ground, spilling out every story he’d ever written. He and Donna had married or she left him at the altar or they’d never met or they’d divorced or… he had no idea if she was out there waiting for him or if she had married Henry Farnsworth in 1994. The wedding had been epic and he’d been glad she met a man who could be what she needed. 

And yet he was pretty sure he should be buying her an anniversary present, because he remembered that she’d become Donna Beckett in late summer more than a decade ago. 

And he had a brother who lived. Tom was alive and dead. Like Schrodinger’s cat… 

A knock on the door and a rattle in the lock shook him from what might have been building to a hysterical fit. He was happier than he could say to see Al, as grumpy as he ever was in the morning, poke his head in with a sort of surprised joy on his face—a look he was pretty sure he was mirroring. 

“Hey Sammy,” Al said quietly, waving off the SP guarding the door. With a deferential nod, the young woman closed and locked it, leaving the two of them to their privacy. “How’re you feeling?” 

Sam sighed, but he couldn’t stop his smile. “Overloaded.” 

Al grinned. “I’ll bet.” His eyes darkened. “I wish I could tell you they’ll give you time to pull it together, but General Markerson’s being his usual pushy self. I’m sure I bitched about him at some point.” 

“I remember,” Sam replied, and chuckled at the words. “Which is the problem, I guess.” 

“Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.” Al sat in the chair next to the bed. 

“How’s Jensen doing?” He wondered if Jake’s mind was a tipped-over library, too. He’d certainly looked like it. 

“Better than he was,” Al allowed, which really didn’t mean anything. Sam let it slide in the face of Al’s clear exhaustion. 

“How are you?” he asked gently. 

Al sighed, but gave him a joyful smile. “Better than I’ve been in a while, Kid,” he allowed. “In fact—” His pocket emitted a loud chirp that made him jump and pull out a cellular phone. He cursed almost silently and held up a finger as he answered. “Hey, sweetie,” he greeted the other party, a paternal tone to his voice that Sam had never heard but remembered perfectly, as memories once again collided in his mind. Al and Beth were happily married with four girls—and Al had no children and had been divorced five times. 

Sam was proud that the former memory was fact and not the latter. 

“No, I’m fine, honey, I promise,” Al was saying, a chagrined look on his face as he listened to the other person. “I—no, I know, honey. I’ve only been gone a couple of weeks.” He looked outraged suddenly. “I’m not some old guy who—” Something placated him and he cocked his head. “Well, yeah, it did. It, um…” He trailed off and looked at Sam as he spoke. “It had to do with Uncle Sam.” He grinned and pulled the phone away from his ear a little. “Yeah, he is…. Yes…. Soph—Sophie? Sophia!” He rolled his eyes and Sam’s mind conjured up a picture of a thin, athletic girl, about 13, with dark hair and crystal blue eyes. Sophie was Al’s youngest, and Sam remembered that she was never silent. At least, a decade ago, she hadn’t been. 

He’d been gone for most of Sophie’s life, it suddenly hit him. He’d been to her oldest sister Ronnie’s wedding, but he had no idea what had happened to any of them. When he’d been leaping with the Project, he hadn’t gotten Beth to wait for Al. Al had been a womanizer, a former drunk, alone. Those memories were making way for family barbeques in Al’s backyard. Playing baseball with Sophie and her sister Betty while Ronnie and Jen and Donna and their parents looked on. He’d been part of that family—Uncle Sam. He put his head in his hands and squeezed, trying to make sure the right reality fit into his brain. 

Al was still calming Sophie down. “Honey, I will tell you everything. I promise. But not now, okay?” A sigh of relief. “Yes. And tell her not to worry. I’ll call… Yes. B—bye. I love you, too. Bye.” He closed the phone and took a bolstering breath. 

“Sophie,” he explained unnecessarily, sliding the phone back into his pocket with a wry, loving grin. “She hasn’t changed much in the last eight years, don’t worry.” 

“I’m glad,” Sam replied warmly, as the Calavicci family slid into its proper place in his mind. “I’m…I’m glad that worked.” 

Al looked at him quizzically, and Sam realized with a shock that Al didn’t remember the timeline where Beth had declared him dead and remarried. The original timeline. The one where Al went into space as a secret pilot with nothing to lose, instead of being the celebrated astronaut with the trading card and the place in NASA history. The one where Sam met him while Al was putting his hand through a vending machine in a drunken rage, instead of at a high-level meeting that Al had been leading. Sam had changed that timeline _after_ he’d severed contact, so Al didn’t have those memories to lose. 

That first jump after Sam gave up the Project and embraced the solitude of the void was suddenly worth every ounce of pain before or since, and Al, content and whole before him, was all the proof he needed. 

“You okay, Sammy?” Al asked again. 

Sam grinned. “Yeah, Al. Yeah. I’m good.” He stood up, stretching carefully against the bandages on his side. “Didn’t you even tell Beth where you went?” he asked, looking out the window again. “Or did you just tell her it was classified again?” 

He didn’t even notice the silence until Al broke it. “Uh, yeah, about that…” 

Sam turned and froze at the sadness in his friend’s eyes. “Al?” 

“Beth died eighteen months ago,” Al answered. “Cancer.” He grinned bitterly. “At least for her it was quick.” Sam remembered that for Al’s dad, it hadn’t been. 

“Eighteen months…?” Sam didn’t have to be a genius to do the math. “I was still leaping with you then.” He should have known. God, Al should have been able to share the pain with him, at least… 

Al nodded wearily, but with no guilt for his omission. “It wouldn’t have made a difference, Sam,” he said, with the same sort of solid perseverance he’d shown when he’d traded five years in a POW camp for Sam’s brother’s life. “I promised her I wouldn’t worry you.” 

The door opened and the SP stuck her head in apologetically. “Admiral Calavicci? I’m to escort you to General Markerson, sir. As soon as possible.” 

Al dropped his chin to his chest. “Three hours of sleep and he’s back at it,” he grumbled. He looked at the young woman. “Give us just a couple of minutes, okay?” 

“Admiral—” she began. 

“A couple of minutes, Airman,” he said, with enough quiet authority that she simply nodded and closed the door again. 

“Al,” Sam began again, helplessly. He’d gotten Beth to wait for Al and he’d still lost her. “I’m sorry.” 

Al smiled fondly. “Not every guy gets forty years with the love of his life, Sam.” His eyes darkened and he blinked, shaking it off. “We’ll, uh, we’ll talk later. About everything.” He rolled his eyes. “I have a feeling, given exactly whose body we delivered on that chopper, that the third degree is going to be long and brutal, but I don’t think even Markerson will be able to justify keeping any of us.” He knocked on the door and the young airman opened it immediately. “Can my friend here get an escort over to Captain Jensen’s room?” he asked politely. The look he gave Sam was significant. “I think they should probably talk.” 

Sam nodded his understanding and smiled his thanks as the airman said she’d send an escort ASAP. Once the door closed and locked behind the two of them, he sank down onto the bed. His head hurt. So badly. But he knew, as his own brain tried to process the multiple pasts he remembered, that this was the hell Jake had been trying to cope with all these years. The void had been Sam’s buffer—when he was there, he remembered, but only the world as it was right that moment. He was praying that his mind was just in shock, and that the memories that never happened would eventually fade back into the storybooks like they were supposed to. 

Al had… been uniquely suited to the task, something about his neural makeup and life experience and interaction with Ziggy’s temporal filter making him able to withstand the confusion of knowing everything that had never happened thanks to Sam’s interference. Sam had talked to Verbena about it when he was at the Project trying to get Al home, but he really wanted to talk to Al himself. About how it felt and how he coped and… and to thank him for being willing to go through that for him. Al had kept him sane. There wasn’t a way to repay that. 

But Jensen had nothing to keep _him_ sane. A neural makeup similar to Al’s, sure, but the completely unsupported burden of remembering a reality that not only didn’t happen, but was never supposed to…? The offshoot was, by definition, a mistake. Any offshoot would have been a skew of reality that couldn’t have survived indefinitely, but the fact that Max’s dream world had somehow come to pass there made the whole thing poisoned and evil. No one should have to remember that. And it sounded like, because of Max’s interference in the real world, Jensen could no longer forget what needed to be forgotten in order for him to keep from drowning. 

Sam still remembered being Jake Jensen. It persisted in a way that only his leap into Al persisted. Something about their neural similarities, he guessed. While he was leaping with Al as his observer, he’d been grounded by his friend’s presence, but once he’d left the Project, Sam was immersed in a host’s life and he _knew_ Jake. He knew the scared, angry, beaten child Jake had been, the kid who refused to give in to a life that should have set him up for failure. Al had done the same, in fact, though Sam knew that from late night conversations and stories at the holiday table because Al had managed to integrate the bad stuff, somehow. Jake never dealt with his past, he forcibly forgot it. The migraine Sam had building in his head right now as a result of the memories he was trying to shuffle told him that forgetting the way Jake normally did might not be possible. 

A knock on the door heralded another SP, this one tall and impossibly young. “Dr. Beckett?” the boy said quietly. “I’m supposed to escort you to Colonel Clay’s rooms.” 

Sam stood up and squared his shoulders, feeling oddly out-of-place in his own body. “Thank you, Airman,” he said, stepping out into the hall and following the young enlisted man silently. They left the medical wing behind and Sam squashed a jealous thought at the realization that Jensen and Cougar must have been released at some point during the night. 

The airman knocked on a door and slid a key in the lock. Sam smirked. At least the Losers were under house arrest, too. The door slid open and the sounds of a good-natured argument rolled out of what looked for all the world like a large hotel suite. If your average hotel had a guard on the door and bars on the windows. 

“Look, I swear I remember him saying that,” Pooch said. Sam walked in and saw that the four of them were gathered around a table playing poker for what looked like a combination of tongue depressors, swizzle sticks, and packets of artificial sweetener. He wondered fancifully which ones were worth what. 

“Roque didn’t have a mother,” Jake replied. He and Cougar were both in wheelchairs wearing the same drab scrubs Sam himself was. They both sported IVs, however, so he counted himself lucky. “He sprang full-born from the gates of Hell.” 

“I’ve met his mother,” Clay told them, discarding two cards and dealing himself replacements. He looked up at Sam and his escort and nodded. The SP nodded back and took his leave. “Gates of Hell aren’t too far wrong.” 

Jake laughed a little and Sam was disturbed by the fact that he knew Jake was thinking, _You should have met_ my _mom._

“How are you feeling, Doc?” Pooch asked, kicking at a chair off to the side and gesturing to it. “Zoomies said we’d be getting breakfast at some point, but I haven’t seen it.” 

Sam nodded but didn’t sit, taking in Pooch’s sunken eyes and Clay’s stiff movements. “Did you stay up all night waiting for it?” he asked. 

Jensen snorted, then whined at the pain the action caused. “That’s what I said.” He looked longingly at the coffeepot that sat on the counter of the tiny kitchen and Sam took pity on him and poured two cups, giving him one while taking one for himself. “The General is an asshole and didn’t want to wait until morning to find out what happened.” 

Clay shrugged, far more understanding. “If I were him I’d be scared shitless, too. Max was confirmed KIA—body and all—weeks ago and suddenly we’re waltzing in with him slung over our shoulder—” 

“ _My_ shoulder,” Pooch griped with a smirk, tossing his whole hand into the pot and standing to get his own coffee. 

“Give it up. Man, my niece whines less,” Jake growled back. The group of them tensed at the cold tones, and Sam tried to figure out what the problem was as Clay glossed over the moment. 

“—and a crater in the desert where a top-secret test site used to be.” He waved a hand at Sam. “And then there’s you, back from the abyss or whatever.” He sighed. “The General deserves some answers.” 

“Not that you really have any for him,” Jake replied, all the frigid anger of a moment ago gone like it had never been there. He even seemed a little embarrassed, and the tension in the room became clear as Sam remembered Jake beating up an eighth-grader when he was in sixth-grade, just for taunting him. He’d been blind-angry in a way he never let himself be. It was one of the few times his dad was ever proud of him and Jake had had nightmares about his own behavior for days afterward. He’d vowed never to let himself lose control like that again. 

Sam sat down and nursed his coffee and his headache. Insight into Jensen’s problem was good, but the price right now felt awfully steep. In the back of his mind was a niggling worry that he’d never _forget_ being Jake Jensen, which seemed like some horrible invasion of privacy somehow. 

Pooch sat down with his coffee, throwing a not-quite-apologetic look at Cougar, who’d clearly wanted some of his own. “They’re either gonna bury us or give us medals,” Pooch prophesied. 

“Depending on how well the guys at the top knew Max,” Clay finished for him. He handed his empty coffee cup to Cougar, who’d grabbed his IV bag and was carrying it to the kitchen with him. 

“Shit for cards,” Jake muttered angrily, clearly lost in his own thoughts and remembering something from the offshoot. He threw his cards into the pot with enough force to send the pile of random stuff flying, and the action caused the rest of them to freeze again. 

Jake sighed and reached for his IV, removing the needle from his arm with what seemed long practice and ignoring the disapproval on Cougar’s face as the older man walked back in and put a full cup in front of the colonel. “I don’t need it,” he said, mostly to himself. He stood up, wincing and reaching a hand up to rub his bandaged shoulder. “What I need is something to eat and out of this place.” 

He stalked away toward the living room and they let him go. Sam tried to figure out whether it would really help to go after him. His memories of being Jake Jensen extended as far as Jake remembered, for his entire life before the offshoot. Jake didn’t deal with the past. In a real sense, he _couldn’t_ deal with it. To have a whole new set of memories—memories as painful as his childhood—thrown at him without warning was like asking an infant to run a marathon. The skills weren’t there. 

Sam really wished he could talk to Verbena. 

”If you have any magic tricks to get the crap out of his head, now’s the time to use ‘em.” Clay’s anger was at least half guilt, but Sam knew the colonel placed a fair amount of the blame on the Project as well. He nodded and headed into the living room, leaving Jensen’s team frozen and waiting behind him. 

******* 

Jake sat heavily on the ratty couch and rubbed at the scars on his leg, trying to use the pain to blot out the other pain. Didn’t work of course, and he resisted the urge to throw the tacky plastic flower arrangement on the coffee table across the room. He’d fucked up. He’d let himself believe that somehow, fixing things for Calavicci and his friend was going to make him better. But he was stuck with this. Alone forever with a brain full of shit that only he remembered. 

“Does your head hurt as much as mine?” 

Dr. Beckett stood in the doorway and looked exhausted, and Jake wanted to hate him in the worst way. It would be easy to blame Beckett and his time travel and all—mostly because it actually _was_ their fault—but it didn’t fix anything. And from what Calavicci had told him of how this whole clusterfuck happened, Beckett was as much a casualty as Jake was. 

“I’m used to it by now,” Jake said quietly, grinding his teeth to keep from screaming. 

“I’m sorry.” And Beckett clearly meant it. 

“Bet you’ll look before you leap next time, huh?” Jake processed what he’d just said and laughed. 

“Yeah, I think that’ll be a long-running joke from now on.” Beckett sat down on the opposite couch and leaned forward, aborting the movement as it clearly pulled on the wound in his side. “Al thinks they’ll let us go pretty soon,” he said. “I’m not quite caught up on things here, but it sounds like Max was as dangerous and connected here as he was in the offshoot. Bringing him in might be a get out of jail free card.” 

Jake sighed. “They’ll sweep the whole damn thing under the rug,” he replied, remembering a meeting on the beach in Antigua THERE, when Stegler showed his colors. “And probably us with it. I don’t trust Stegler not to fuck us over trying to cover his own ass.” 

“Al will fight for you.” 

Right. “All due respect, the Admiral’s got about as much power here as we do.” 

Beckett smiled like he was remembering something. “You might be surprised.” 

“Haven’t been so far.” Jake sat back carefully, resting the back of his head on the top of the couch. He closed his eyes. 

“Listen, I have a friend,” Beckett started tentatively. “Verbena Beeks. She was the head psychiatrist at the Project.” 

Jake chuckled. “I have a feeling I’ll be through enough psych evals before they let us go. I don’t need to go looking for them.” 

“She understands what you’re…” Beckett paused and when he spoke again, his voice was softer, more brittle. “She understands what we’re all going through.” 

Jake opened his eyes and looked at the tired, overloaded, swamped man sitting across from him and realized that Beckett was trying to do the same thing he was: forget this. So maybe he wasn’t totally alone, then. 

“Is she cute?” 

********  
to be continued…


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My life is utter and complete crap at the moment, people, and I am very sorry this is so delayed. And not the end. Part 19 will be out soon. I hope. Thanks for continuing to read, everybody!

**Boston, Massachusetts  
Two months later…**

Sam Beckett sat at the small desk that took up most of the space in his tiny home office. The computer in front of him showed a mass of data that he didn’t really want to look at, but just couldn’t let go.

“Sam, you’re brooding again.”

He looked up at the woman who was leaning against the doorjamb, looking neat and prim in a dark red business suit. Donna Beckett had aged since he’d been gone, but she was no less beautiful. And she still didn’t take any of his crap.

“I’m just trying to make sense of it,” he replied, turning back to the computer. Ziggy’s processing ability was both more powerful and much slower now that she was living in the internet. She’d been revising this analysis of the offshoot for weeks now, but this seemed to be the final data. He hoped. “Ziggy, have we determined why the initial estimate of the offshoot’s size was incorrect?”

Ziggy’s voice emanated from a speaker set high on the bookshelf. “The initial estimate was predicated on Captain Jensen’s brainwave extractions,” she told him patiently. “Because his memories of the offshoot were intermingled with memories of our own reality, the estimate was, by necessity, imprecise. Once I was able to extrapolate the time based on your brainwave extractions I was able to form a more complete picture.”

Sam shook his head. Something still wasn’t right here—the initial estimate had been off by more than three months. “But it can’t be just that—”

“Sam, honey, stop.” Donna stood in front of him and blocked his view of the computer. “Please take a break and come say goodbye to me, okay?”

> “Take a break and wish me luck.”
> 
> Donna had stood next to his chair and Sam had looked up, for a moment, before turning back to the spreadsheet on his desktop. He ignored the heat of a New Mexico summer and just let himself sweat.
> 
> “Okay, fine,” she grumbled good-naturedly. “Look, we can always take Huber up on his offer to move the project to MIT?” she told him, an absent kiss dropping onto his head as he sat in front of his computer in the alcove off the kitchen, justifying his existence again. It seemed it was all he ever did these days: beg for money from a government that didn’t _exactly_ believe his theories would work.
> 
> “Huber doesn’t have the space,” he reminded her. “Or the money. Or the connections…” He sighed and leaned back, looking up to see her dressed in her light blue power suit. She was heading to a meeting with one of the civilian investors. She was always better at this stuff than he was. “If Ziggy loses her connection to the military and government databases, we’d risk screwing up the entire timeline.” He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. “If we can leap at all.”
> 
> Donna sat down next to him at the table, putting a calming hand over his. “It’ll work, Sam,” she told him firmly. “You know it will. Eventually, we’ll figure out the kinks—“
> 
> He snorted. “Eventually. When is eventually, Donna?” he asked, standing up to pace the small space between the alcove and the fridge. “When the DOD finally shuts us down? When they pull the plug on Ziggy? When they undo all the work we’ve done over the past five years?”
> 
> Donna blocked his path and he looked into her eyes, a very real fear running through him that he’d pretty much destroyed the professional lives of a dozen people by wrapping them up in a project that was never going to go anywhere. It was hard to get back into the system once you’d been part of a long-term, _failed_ military project. Too many years out of sight and out of mind and zero return on investment. If the project succeeded—no matter how classified it was—word got around and people came asking for you, but if the DOD shut them down now, with nothing to show for all this time…?
> 
> And then there was the real reason for the project. He glanced involuntarily through the doorway to the living room, toward the photograph that sat on the mantle. Him, Katie… Tom. Christmas 1969. Three months before his big brother died.
> 
> “They can’t shut us down, Donna,” he said quietly.
> 
> She stretched up and kissed him deeply, the love and acceptance soothing something in him. Making him, almost, believe she was right. “You’ll figure out a way, Sam,” she told him. “You always do.”

He’d figured out a way all right—he’d leaped the next night. That way had left his wife a virtual widow for almost a decade. Worse than that, really. He would have been faithful had he known…

He shook his head and looked up at her, as she stood, looking too patient and too loving. He’d probably drifted off into his storybooks like this a million times in the last six weeks, since he walked off that Air Force base in New Mexico and into her arms. And she was always there, patiently waiting for him to come back.

“I don’t deserve you,” he told her again. There were never going to be enough times to tell her.

“No,” she agreed smugly, kissing him lightly. “You don’t. But I’m here anyway.” She looked at her watch and straightened up. “Or will be for another half an hour.” Donna shook her head. “I’m sorry, Sam. I’d cancel the meeting if I could—”

He stood up and wrapped an arm around her. “And we’d pay for all this with what? My stipend from the university?” MIT was a fabulous institution, and Sam had been glad he still had friends who could get him a professorship after this many years away, but it didn’t pay enough to live on.

“I thought Jake had his fortune at your disposal,” she teased.

Sam grinned, but with an edge of pain about it. He and Jake had gotten to be friends since they’d come back from the offshoot, but they’d both spent the last few weeks reestablishing their lives and hadn’t had much time to talk about the important things. “Jake’s got a sister and a niece to worry about,” he reminded her. “He’s serious about investing in ‘Ziggy and her babies,’ as he likes to call them, but… Right now he’s got his own problems to worry about.”

“How is he doing?” she asked gently. She knew from experience this was more difficult than it seemed.

Sam sat down again. “Cougar says he’s mostly fine. Verbena says different.” He shook his head. Verbena had moved back to Boston and started up a successful therapy practice after PQL was shut down. She had a standing weekly appointment with Sam and another in Nashua with Jake. She joked that she only drove up there because he knew all the best restaurants and never made her pay, but she’d taken a shine to the young man who she said reminded her, in equal parts, of Sam and Al both. She didn’t discuss his progress with Sam, but it was obvious from their own therapy sessions that she didn’t think Jake was adjusting very well.

“It’s… it’s hard to explain, but when you remember, it’s like it really happened.” He pushed away the memories waiting to ambush him. “No matter how bad it was.”

Donna nodded. “I remember,” she murmured. He looked up in surprise to find a brooding look on her face. “Al… It was so hard for him in the beginning. And even later, depending on what was going on with you.” She sighed. “Beth did what she could, but all she could really do was just be there for him until he sorted it out in his head.” A wry grin graced her face and it struck him once again how very beautiful his wife was. “The rest of us don’t remember what you remember, Sam. It makes it hard to commiserate.”

Sam nodded, feeling the little headache grow. He got it whenever he realized something was only in a storybook—Donna remembered Tom as Sam’s carefree big brother, not as the shadow that hung over Sam’s entire adult life. Beth was a close friend whose experience had made her a comfort to Donna when her own husband was MIA, not the memory of love that had skewed so much of Al’s life. Things were different. But they were strangely the same, he was coming to understand, and he wondered if Al realized it, too. Sam still pursued time travel, even in the new timeline, even without the driving force of somehow magically bringing his dead brother back from the grave. Al…

“Did Al have a drinking problem?” he asked suddenly, his mind processing another new theory. He let it gestate as he fed it information.

“For a while,” Donna replied simply. She was surprisingly patient and matter-of-fact when he asked questions he should have known the answer to, and Sam wondered if this was what it was like having a husband with brain damage. Except that, according to every test they’d run in the last eight weeks, Sam’s brain was functioning perfectly. As long as he could remember the reality they lived in instead of the reality he’d lived.

“He and Beth were having problems,” Donna explained. “His drinking was affecting the girls, and you know how she was with her girls. Beth told me once that she’d thrown him out of the house the day before you first met him—I don’t remember why. A couple of days later, you walked in on him—“

“Kicking the crap out of a vending machine…” Except that it hadn’t happened that way the first time. Not exactly. Just like a helicopter full of kids crashed, but not exactly the same way. Was it possible that time never really let itself be changed completely? That was a depressing thought.

“It’ll all fall into place eventually, my love,” she murmured, hugging him around the head and shoulders as she stood next to his chair. “It did for him.”

“He doesn’t talk about it,” Sam admitted, the tension that had been growing in his belly for the last month making itself known. “Not to me, anyway. It’s not exactly that he’s been avoiding me, but he’s been visiting the girls and…” His eyes closed and for once, he didn’t see anything in the darkness. “I didn’t think about what this would do to him when I created the interface.”

“You did, Sam,” she said flatly, angry at him for feeling guilty. She’d been angry at him for that a lot lately. “I can show you the notebooks. You mapped out a dozen eventualities, a hundred permutations. Verbena says you and Al spent hours talking to her about what the effects might be if you changed the timeline.” She sighed. “We just never assumed he’d remember _forever_.”

“And we never assumed I’d change _so much_ ,” he muttered dejectedly. _Enough,_ Verbena grumbled in his head. _Live in the now—it’s the only timeline you haven’t changed yet._ He looked up at Donna. “You’re going to miss your train.”

She jumped at the sudden non seqitur and looked at her watch. “Crud!” He got another kiss as she gathered her things. “Have _fun_ this weekend, okay? I don’t think Pooch invited you all to his place to sit around and mope.”

Sam smiled genuinely at that. Pooch had said that Stegler was finally making good on his promise to clear their names for good and he was “damn sure gonna celebrate that!” And he wanted his team and the men responsible around him when he did.

“I’ll try,” he promised.

“You’d better.”

**********

**Springfield, Massachusetts**

Jake scratched idly at the scars on his leg, then stopped himself. It was a bad habit. Neurotic.

He was trying really hard not to be neurotic these days.

Under his jeans, his leg was just fugly, and he limped now—just a little bit—when he worked it too hard. He really wanted to hunt Wilson down and make him pay for the fact that he’d never be able to strut down the beach in shorts again. He shoved away an image of himself, pissed-drunk and pathetic on the beach in Antigua. He hadn’t given a fuck about anything those first few weeks after Cougar and Clay died. Sure as hell not what he looked like in bermudas. That hadn’t happened HERE, and he’d spent two hours this morning, driving down here to Pooch’s house with Cougar silent and steady and _alive_ by his side, so....

 _Live in the now,_ as Dr. Beeks liked to say.

 _Shut the fuck up and deal,_ was more his speed. He swallowed the urge to hit something and tried to take Coug’s advice and “just stop.”

Cougar was hanging around, which Jake shouldn’t have been surprised by, but kind of was. Granted, Cougar didn’t have any family, per se, though Jake knew he had an _abuelita_ in Mexico City that he sent money to every once in a while, but he had friends in the military and out. He could have gone anywhere, but when Jake was being a true shit and asked him why he didn’t go find someone else to piss off, he’d just smile that damn smile of his and say, “It’s not as much fun as bugging you.”

Cougar was awesome. Though Jake really wished the guy’d use some of his fortune and buy his own house. Stop crashing at his. Friends were friends, but Jake wasn’t in the military anymore and he shouldn’t have to bunk in with someone else. Unless she was hot…

“Jensen, where the hell’s the beer, man!?”

Jake shook his head and hefted the cooler—which pulled on his healing shoulder in the worst way—and headed from the kitchen out onto the back porch. It was almost disturbingly mild for fall in New England. “Language, Pooch,” he scolded. His niece Beth was playing on the browning lawn with Jerome, who was trying to toddle already, the overachiever. “There are children.”

“I heard you, Uncle Linwood!” Beth called obligingly. Jake was so proud.

Pooch shook his head in disgust, but Jolene—because she was awesome—backed Jake up and smacked her husband in the arm. “Fine,” Pooch growled. “Fine. ‘Jensen, where the _heck_ is the adult beverage?’”

Jake grinned and dropped the cooler on the ground next to the grill. He took pity on poor Pooch and handed him a cold one. “Better,” he said approvingly. “You gotta cut that shit out before Jerome starts parroting it back to you.”

“I heard you, Uncle Jake!” Beth sang out. Traitor.

“Get yourselves in here,” Clay ordered from the house. “Show’s about to start.”

“You’re not the boss of me any more,” Jake muttered, grabbing an extra beer and taking a swig of his own before heading back inside to the family room and its brand new big-screen TV. Pooch hadn’t spent much of Aisha’s ill-gotten booty, but the subtle upgrades were there if you knew where to look.

The skinflint in question smacked him on his good shoulder. “Give it up, buddy,” he told him. “Clay’s always gonna be your boss.”

Jake shrugged. "Sadly true."

“Shove over,” Jake told Cougar, taking up a seat on the arm of Pooch’s enormous couch while Pooch cuddled up with Jolene at the other end. Cougar looked up at him sharply until Jake gave him the beer in his other hand and Jake looked around the room in contentment.

It was sort of "old home week" at Chez Porteous, and they’d all come back to roost. Clay had been spending some time getting his mom installed in a nursing home on Nantucket, and Jake and Cougar had been working on his sister Jenny’s new place in Nashua—because he and Clay _knew_ how to spend other people’s money, unlike _some_ people. Jenny and Beth had driven down with him and Cougar to play with the baby and see Jolene.

Pooch had even invited Sam and Al—they’d been instrumental in all of this, after all. It was good to see them both, though he hadn’t really had a chance to talk to either of them yet. Al had been in California at his oldest daughter’s house for the last couple of weeks, Jake knew. It was an impromptu family reunion, and the timing was kind of suspicious, given the hint of tension between him and Sam.

Sam was settling back in with his wife in Boston (and Jake still couldn’t imagine a woman who would love you enough to wait _eight years_ for you to come back to her, much less the five Al’s wife had apparently waited while he was in Vietnam—though come to think of it, there was Jolene…), and he and Jake were slowly trying to put together an independent think tank where the technology that had created Ziggy could be developed without the government in the fucking way. Ziggy had some pretty specific ideas herself, and Jake had gotten used to communicating with a live freaking computer via email and text as the three of them hammered out the details.

He should spend more time on that, he told himself. Less time drinking and brooding on how fucking screwed up his brain was. The anger and frustration that were never very far from the surface bubbled up again, leaving him wanting to hit something. Punching bags weren’t doing it anymore, and he was even a little afraid of himself sometimes these days. He’d put a fist through a piece of drywall while finishing Jenny’s basement last week—a memory of half-carrying Pooch to the helicopter in Pripyat blindsiding him, set off by the sound of the tile cutter Cougar was using in the bathroom nearby. It was all fucked up and he was becoming his dad and he should be able to keep a fucking lid on it—

Cougar’s elbow poked him in the stomach, setting off a ghostly flare of pain from Aisha’s love jab in Brazil. “Ow, man!” he muttered, firmly back in the here and now. “The fuck was that?” He’d said it as quietly as he could, but Sam and Al were both looking at him from across the room and Clay was pretending not to.

“Stop,” Cougar said bluntly. _Stop thinking. Stop remembering._

Jake took a deep breath and stopped. Coug really was the best friend a guy could have.

“Shut the… heck… up everybody,” Clay said, watching his words as Beth carried Jerome into the room and laid him down on the rug so she could sit and play with him. “Here it comes.”

LNN reporter Matty Roth looked coifed and calm and sat behind a news desk, which was not his usual venue. Jake had met him once, in the field in Afghanistan, and the guy was a bigger adrenaline junkie than Jake himself. A good man, though. It was kind of fitting that he was the one to get the “leak”.

“Now on to a remarkable story of American soldiers risking their lives and their futures for the safety of all of us.”

Clay snorted. “Laying it on a little thick, there,” he muttered.

“Did you _see_ that crater in Brazil?” Pooch shot back incredulously. “We fu—” He looked at Beth who looked right back, challenging him because she was nothing if not a Jensen. “—freakin’ saved the world, shutting him down,” he finished.

“LNN has received information that tomorrow, the US Army will finally reveal details—” “Meaning they’ve doctored up something that looks good,” Clay whispered.

“—of a year-long operation led by a covert team who willingly allowed the world to think them disgraced and dead in the hopes of taking down an arms dealer whose power stretched, literally, across the globe.”

“Don’t know as I’d say we _willingly_ did anything,” Pooch put in bitterly.

“Are you two going to heckle this whole thing?” Jenny asked testily from her spot on the floor. She was playing with the baby. Again.

“Probably,” Jake assured her. He really needed to get with Beth and convince his sister to remarry—just not a murdering asshole this time. Jerome _was_ pretty darn cute, though. Not as cute as Jasmine... Jake closed down that thought, shoving it toward an overfull closet in the back of his mind. The longer they were all home and safe, the more the shit in his brain that didn’t fit right bothered him.

“You may remember in August of last year, the story of an American helicopter full of Bolivian children that was shot down near La Paz.” Jake looked at his beer bottle instead of the archival footage. His head was fucking _full_ of archival footage from a lot of shit operations, including that one. He didn’t need any more. “A US Army covert team was accused of taking part in an unauthorized military operation that led to those deaths and, seemingly, to their own.”

“Doesn’t make the little ones any less dead,” Cougar breathed. Jake bumped him with his elbow in understanding.

“In reality, while the tragic deaths of those children surely weighed heavily on their minds, this deep infiltration team, believed dead, was in fact working in secret to take down an arms dealer known only as Max.”

“Fifteen CIA spooks just had heart attacks,” Pooch muttered with a smile. Jake nodded. He was pretty sure no one had ever even _thought_ the name Max outside of spy channels. And now that fucker (well, those fuckers, he guessed—twins, seriously!?) who worked every side of every damn conflict they could get their hands on, were being brought into the light. The upper crust of the US intelligence community were suddenly scrambling to hide from the law or profess their undying devotion to it.

“I hear upward mobility in the Agency has increased 300 fold,” Al remarked, deadpan.

“So many entry level openings right now, my _son_ could get a job at the CIA,” Pooch joked.

“Bite your tongue, Linwood,” Jolene snapped back.

“And finally, in Brazil nearly one year later, this brave team of soldiers brought a ruthless killer to justice.” The cameras went back to Matty, sitting at the desk. “It’s rumored that the team responsible for this victory over global terrorism have returned to the United States—and, we hope, to their families—" Jake grinned as Jolene snuggled in deeper with Pooch and Jenny looked over at him with a smile. "—though their identities continue to be a mystery.” Matty tried to look serious yet sincere and stared into the camera. “You may not receive a hero’s welcome, gentlemen,” he said gravely. “But know that your country thanks you for your service and your dedication to justice.”

“That’s us,” Jake said dully, drinking the rest of his bottle in one go as he thought of the utter shit that made up the last fourteen months. “Brave little soldiers.”

“Except Roque,” Pooch put in after a long, bitter, moment of silence.

“Yeah,” Jake agreed, a little more life in his voice. “He was just a dick.”

“I—” Beth started.

“—heard you, Uncle Jake,” Jake finished for her in as silly a voice as he could manage. He scooped her up (when the hell did she get so _big_!? Damn that hurt!), twirled her around, and plopped her on her feet at the edge of the carpet.

"So are we going shopping, or what?" Jenny asked, lifting Jerome into her arms as she stood up from the floor. "Jolene, I have 1800 square feet of brand new house and half the furniture I need."

"I wanna go!" Beth demanded predictably. Ten-year-old girls and shopping just went hand in hand. "I get a bunk bed, right? You said."

"Yes, Beth," Jenny answered, long-suffering. "I said."

Jolene kissed Pooch hard, earning a chuckle from Clay and snickers from the other two Losers and Al. "Let me get Jerome down for a nap, and we'll go," she promised as Jenny passed her son off to her. "You boys gonna be able to take care of my little man while we're gone?"

Jake rolled his eyes. "Yes, Jolene, six grown men can look after one sleeping infant."

"He don't sleep for long," Pooch warned.

"The sooner you get him to sleep and get out the sooner you can come barreling home when we call for reinforcements," Clay told her helpfully. He looked eager for them to go. Which meant he wanted to "talk business."

Jake sighed. Wasn't business _over_? Hadn't they done enough fucking business? He’d spent the last month helping Jenny find a new place, fixing up that place, being a good uncle. It was frighteningly regular and normal and awesome. He was done, damn it. He’d literally seen enough anguish for two lifetimes and all he wanted now was a boring job building his own tech empire so he could be the next Elon Musk—and at least a night or two a month where he didn’t wake up to the memory of a dead friend or a loaded gun on a lonely beach.

Was that so wrong?

Jolene gave Clay a wary look but headed up stairs with Jerome anyway. Jake pretended that he didn't remember what Ashley and Jasmine's room looked like and how different it was from what they'd done with the same space for Jerome. He’d given up believing he could ignore it all enough to forget it, but his fucked up mind kept trying.

"All right, guys," Pooch said, grabbing the remote off the table. "Now the war movie's over, it's time to watch the game."

Jake chuckled with the rest of them and pretended to give a shit about whether the Bills beat Denver.

*******

Clay watched his boys as they wagered on the game none of them cared about. He felt desperately old and worn out compared to them all. A dinosaur in a room full of the next generation of suburbia. He’d spent a lot of time thinking as he went about all the regular, everyday crap a guy sliding slowly toward fifty was supposed to do. He found his mom a doctor on Nantucket and an assisted living community where she’d be taken care of. She knew her Frankie still—most of the time—but talking to her only reminded him that he’d _be_ her one day, old and frail and off his rocker, but without the son who at least _tried_ to visit once a year or so. He found a houseboat he could live on. If he bought it, his neighbors would be John, who had retired at sixty from a high-powered finance job, and his wife Francie, who had stayed at home in their childless house for forty years and volunteered at the local medical clinic, “but not the one the homeless people all go to.”

He’d probably commit suicide in a week.

It was halftime before Jolene and the girls loaded up and the moment the car left the driveway Pooch hit mute and turned on him.

"All right, Clay. Talk."

Clay shook his head. They'd been working together too damn long. He looked over at Calavicci and Beckett, but didn’t pause. They weren't exactly unknown quantities anymore, and God knew they'd been through their own hell and helped him and his Losers end theirs besides. They were here, they could stay.

He drained his beer and sat forward. "I got a call from Stegler," he said quietly. Jensen stiffened in his seat but the rest of them seemed willing to listen. "He's hot shit now, you can imagine. The guy who brought in Max."

"Twice," Pooch added, deadpan.

"Anyway," Clay continued. "The Joint Chiefs is suddenly gung-ho to ferret out all the dirty little secrets like Max—"

"He wasn't a dirty little secret, Clay," Jensen broke in. "They knew exactly what he was." He snorted and Clay could see the anger building again. "Hell, they probably knew exactly _where_ he was half the time."

Damn it, he’d thought, before he left for Nantucket, that Jensen was getting better, but he hadn’t missed the new bruises decorating the kid’s fist, nor the way he wandered off into his mind when you weren’t looking. This was like PTSD to a dangerous degree and there were only two people in the world who understood enough of what really happened to help him out. He looked over at Beckett and saw Jake’s fucking twin, while Calavicci just looked as old as Clay himself felt. Fabulous.

“I can’t imagine they _really_ give a shit all of a sudden,” Pooch chimed in. “Probably just covering their asses like everyone else.” Cougar nodded his agreement.

Clay had known this was going to be a hard sell, but he had to try. He wasn't sure he was willing to give up the fight just yet. He _was_ sure he wasn’t willing to do it without his team.

"So what the hell do they want from us?" Pooch wanted to know.

"He's looking for men he can trust—"

"Expendable men," Cougar said shortly.

"Men who've already shown—"

"What?" Jensen asked, coming to his feet as the anger bubbled over. "That they're willing to let the government shit on them and just keep taking it? They’re willing to go ahead and do the disgraced and dead thing over and over until they actually _are_?" He looked around at the room with a desperate yearning and Clay knew what he was seeing: stability, home, family...

Maybe Clay really had just been too long in the trenches to want that any more, if he ever really had. What he wanted was to know whether there were any more monsters like Max out there and to take them down if there were. Keep the world safe for normal people, even if he couldn't be one himself.

"No. I can’t—I'm out, man," Pooch said, regret in his tone. "I got a kid. I got a life." He looked around as well. "I'm not giving it up to go back out there and tilt at fucking windmills."

Cougar shook his head, but in truth, he really didn't have to say anything. Clay had known before they even took Max down that if they survived, Cougar was going to walk away. He'd seen and caused enough death for a thousand lifetimes and he felt each and every kill too personally. He’d spent the entire time they’d been back with Jake’s family, helping out, trying to do something normal. Clay had a suspicion though, that as much as Carlos Alvarez wanted out, he didn’t have an exit anymore than Clay himself did. But he was young enough and good enough to keep trying to find one.

And then there was Jake himself. He'd be insane in a whole different way if _he_ wanted back in...

 _Hell._ Clay sighed. He refused to name the feeling in his gut “fear.” Because he _wasn’t_ so far gone into the black of black ops that he couldn’t live a real life if given the chance. He wasn’t that much of a Bad Man Doing Good Things. "I'm telling you what he told me," he finally said hopelessly.

"Fine," Jensen replied, a disappointment in his eyes that Clay fought not to react to. He wouldn’t add fuel to the fire. "You told us. Now you can go back and tell the fucking company man—" he choked on the last few words and Clay closed his eyes. This reaction to something Jake had seen in that mysterious THERE of his had been a frequent occurrence for too long.

No one was surprised when Jensen walked right out the porch door and into the backyard.

"Thought you said this was going to get better," he snapped at Calavicci. Beckett nodded to them both and headed after Jensen.

"This _is_ better," Cougar said quietly.

"Then Heaven help him." Clay sighed and didn't say another fucking word about Stegler.

********  
to be concluded


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE END IS HERE! Wow. That last-quarter rewrite was brutal. But I hope you like it.

The backyard seemed deserted, and Sam let Jake have a moment before he went looking for him. God, he was tired. He hadn’t been sure Al was avoiding him before, but he was now. There was a distance between them that Sam couldn’t bridge and he didn’t know if it was because he felt so guilty for what he’d put Al through, or because Al blamed him for doing it. All he knew was that he really, _really_ needed to talk to his best friend about all of this. There was no substitute for someone who knew exactly how complicated your brain had become.

Like Jake’s. Sam’s memories were muted by the knowledge that they had never happened, or rather, that they had _unhappened_. It was a theoretical knowledge, but then, the people those memories had happened to were sort of theoretical too. Leaping into Al, into Tom’s Vietnam buddy, into _himself_ —those memories were still real for him. Real and vivid, even though, going over them with Verbena and Donna, he knew things hadn’t happened that way. Most of his time leaping was fairy tales in his mental library. After all, it wasn’t often he had to see his own family in trouble, and it was like the leaping or God or whatever had given him the detachment to turn the rest of it into data to be stored and ignored.

Mostly.

Jake’s memories were _all_ his family. And most of that family, at one time or another, died. Sam remembered the Naval officers at his parents’ door, remembered the useless platitude—“your son Tom was a credit to his unit, Mrs. Beckett”—remembered when that memory became a false one and he learned to live with the real one, knowing he’d traded Al’s life for Tom’s. He couldn’t quite imagine having every memory be that painful, every guilt that fresh—

 _Enough,_ he told himself sharply. _Time to take care of the matter at hand._ So he went looking for Jake. He looked up. Most people didn't, and he supposed in part it was a function of his naturally optimistic disposition. Well, that, and once upon a time he'd _been_ Jake Jensen. Hiding in a tree was never a bad tactical decision for him.

Luckily, at some point someone had built a tree house in the largest oak on the property. It didn't look entirely safe, but Jake was clearly not worried about that these days. Sam wished now he’d spent more time helping Jake come to grips with all of this. He understood the younger man’s problem in a way that he suspected only Cougar shared. Jake was caught in a spiral of remembering—when he’d spent his life trying to forget—and the guilt and pain of it was going to crush him, sooner rather than later.

"Think that thing'll hold both of us?" Sam asked, one foot on the tree trunk, one hand on the first of the rickety wooden slats that made up the ladder nailed to the trunk.

"Held me, Pooch, and Cougar when Pooch bought the place," Jake replied dully. "What do you have to lose?"

Sam started climbing, ignoring the pain in his still-tender side. "My neck, for one."

Jake snorted. "You heard what Stegler’s after. Life's cheap.”

The climb pulled on Sam's healing abdominal muscles more than he wanted to admit, and he settled onto the little porch outside the tree house with relief. "That doesn't sound like you."

Jake chuckled, the sound hollow and painful. "Not sure we’ve known each other long enough for you to tell.”

"I've been you, remember?" Sam swallowed hard. "Literally." They hadn’t talked about that, about the fact that Sam had leaped into Jake at a time when Sam could _only_ remember what his leapee remembered. About the fact that Sam still understood and remembered that leap all too well. Sam had asked Verbena if she thought he should discuss it with Jake, but she never really answered the question. Which was an answer in itself.

"Not much to recommend it, is there?" Jake asked, grabbing a handful of red leaves and tossing them to the ground one by one. Sam didn’t bother to point out that, all in all, Jake had had a good life—what he chose to remember, at any rate—because the offshoot had ruined that entirely. Maybe for good. The two of them sat in silence for a long time before Jake spoke again. "You remember everything, huh?"

The question had Sam sweating, but _he'd_ started this. "Everything," he agreed. "Every time."

"Jesus, why haven't you eaten a gun yet?" The pain in Jensen's voice was overwhelming and desperately familiar.

"Same reason you haven't," he said easily. "I keep hoping things will get better."

"Well that's insane," Jake fired back. He cocked his head. "Which I guess makes sense."

Sam said nothing. He didn’t really have anything to offer that could help. Yes, having memory after memory in your mind and _knowing_ none of them were real was insane. And he and Al and Jake had absolutely no choice but to deal with it. The fact that Jake didn’t know _how_ to, was the nut he couldn’t crack.

"Did you know I can't remember being five?" Jake said suddenly. Sam did know that. "Or eight. I vaguely remember being ten." He tossed more leaves now, doing Mother Nature's job for her by the handful. "Jenny can fill in the blanks, but none of it's worth hearing." He balled his hands into fists. "God, why can't I forget this, too?"

"You can."

Sam looked down and saw Al standing below them. He'd aged so much during the time Sam had been leaping alone. They both had.

"Just takes time, Kid," Al continued. He actually looked at Sam for the first time in too long, and Sam saw something… Not forgiveness, but a sort of wary concern. Like he didn’t want to care, or didn’t want to help, but couldn’t stop the impulse. Sam shook himself and focused back on Jake.

"It _is_ different now," the younger man conceded after a long moment. "Like weird—"

"Deja vu," all three of them said together.

That got a genuine laugh from Jake, but he sobered quickly. "It’s not like I don’t know what _really_ happened,” he said, though Sam knew he wasn’t trying to convince _them_. “I'm fine most of the time—I don't even call the guys to make sure they're still breathing anymore."

"But you remember when they weren't." Sam looked back down at Al and saw that terrified twenty-three year old being dragged off by the Vietcong. He blinked, knowing the vision would go away. He realized Jake didn't have that certainty yet.

"I'm still figuring out what actually happened," he said, hoping Jake would understand. "It's like constantly sifting through sand—"

"And throwing out the cigar butts," Al put in, a ghost of a smile in his voice. God, Sam missed him.

"It's not real, Jake," Sam said fervently. "You know that? None of the memories that… that’ve _unhappened_ are, but especially that. The offshoot—it was a circular reality. It was never really there in any permanent sense."

"My mesons and neurons beg to differ," Jake joked dully.

"So do mine," Sam admitted, his mouth going dry as he remembered all of the leaps in that poisoned place. The failures that led to more failures… The moment Jake told him he'd have to jump into a nuclear blast—when he realized he'd actually rather be dead than THERE.

He looked at the man beside him and wondered if Jensen had that exact feeling right now.

"But you can forget this, too." He remembered the things that had been in Jake Jensen's head even _before_ all of this, things Jake truly had ignored to the point of forgetting. He wasn’t ignoring them now, Sam suddenly realized, he was dwelling on them. Obsessing on them. _That_ was the problem!

“Whatever happened in that reality,” he tried, treading carefully. “Whatever happened with Cougar the first time… Even if it had been real, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Not him getting shot all to hell, no,” Jake allowed, too easily. “But I left him.”

“Because he made the decision to _make_ you,” Al said, a steel in his voice that made Sam wonder which of them he was really talking to. “Cougar made a decision to let you live, Jensen. You’re an idiot to blame yourself for it.” His eyes met Sam’s and Sam held his breath. “You can hate _him_ for it, but I guarantee you, he didn’t hate you.”

Jake growled in frustration. “I just keep thinking there—”

“—should have been a way,” Sam finished for him, eyes still locked on Al’s. “You can only change a past you’ve lived through, Jake,” he whispered, suddenly knowing the bitter truth of that in a way he hadn’t processed before. He could see in Al’s eyes that his old friend had figured that out long ago. “And you _did_ change it.” He shrugged and looked over at Jake’s bowed head. “Now you need to learn how to live with it. And if that means forgetting it—”

Jake laughed hopelessly. "There are whole fucking _people_ in my head that _don't exist_! How do you forget that?"

"The heck you doing sitting in that tree, Jensen?"

The voice was familiar, but not a Loser. Sam looked for the newcomer, letting Jake get himself together enough to answer the tall man in a police uniform standing on the back porch.

"Julius," Sam whispered, shocked.

Jake shot him a questioning look, but called down to Julius Sampson. "Thinking about renovating, actually, Big J." He sounded completely normal, and Sam envied him the acting ability. "Jerome needs a bigger bachelor pad."

Sam knew that, originally, Julius had been seriously injured by a bullet that had burrowed through his chest. Sam—or rather, Julius's partner Bobby—had saved him from that bullet and saved the life of the sixteen-year-old shooter as well.

Julius had had a sister named Jolene.

"Better give him room to bring his girls up," Julius said with a chuckle. "Boy is gonna be trouble. Come on, game's almost over. Get back in here so we can figure out dinner before the ladies get home." He smirked in a way Sam remembered from a dark Springfield street years ago. "We'll look like heroes, man."

Jake waved him back into the house with a very tight movement and turned on Sam the second Julius disappeared.

"Please tell me you know him?" Jake begged. It seemed like much too much was riding on this.

"What are you talking about?" Al asked from his place on the ground.

"Julius Sampson," Sam said quietly. "I saved him from a bullet in 1994." He shrugged at Al apologetically. "It was after I… left home."

"And before Clay put the team together, but I remember Pooch talking about it. He took extended furlough to help out Jolene’s mom while Big J was getting back on his feet," Jake muttered to himself, as if he was just remembering this. "That must have been when Ashley..." He giggled, but there was no edge of hysteria to it. The relief in his voice was palpable. "Thank God."

"Words outside your head, Kid," Al said testily. Sam smiled as the familiar gripe was directed at someone other than him.

"I've spent my whole time since Brazil trying to figure out why I remembered Pooch and Jolene having babies _before_ the snag." His eyes were dark and cold. "Was driving me even crazier than the rest of it. I was connected to you, right, so I remember things that changed for me?” Sam nodded. That was Ziggy’s theory, anyway. “But... Julius didn't get shot, so Pooch didn't come home, so Ashley wasn't born, so Jolene didn't—What? Want more kids?" He shook his head. "No, Pooch never had a chance to come home for them to try again because we were chasing down Rahkim's people, but..." He looked at the two of them in shock. "Are your brains one big fucking 3-D puzzle?"

Al laughed. "Yeah, Kid," he admitted. "After a while, you just gotta throw out the pieces that don't fit instead of trying to shove ‘em in sideways."

"You owe me fifty bucks, _primo_!" Cougar yelled at Jake from the house.

“ _And_ you gotta change the diaper of doom, man!” Pooch added. “Told you the Donkeys could come back from that!”

Jensen chuckled, but he didn’t move. The guilt swamped his face suddenly and Sam wished there was something he could do to make it better.

“He didn’t want you to stay,” Al said, so quietly that Sam looked down at him to make sure he’d spoken.

“That’s easy to say—” Jake started.

“It’s easy to _do_ ,” Al cut in, and Sam again wondered which one of them he was talking to. “There are times when you know that a friend’s life is worth it. Whatever _it_ is.”

Jensen stared through the house, into something he remembered. “Mine wasn’t,” he whispered. “Total fucking waste. A year and five days and I just went ahead and ate the damn bullet because there wasn’t any point anymore.”

Three months before the offshoot ended, Sam thought, putting together the pieces that had vexed him when he reviewed Ziggy’s files. Jake didn’t remember it because he wasn’t alive to see it. Sam looked down at Al and didn’t see his own shock mirrored there. Instead, he saw a sadness that he’d seen before, directed at him only a week after he came back.

He’d been caught up in a memory from his leap into Vietnam—it seemed his mind was determined to dwell on that—and he’d blurted out an apology for leaving Al there. Al hadn’t bothered to answer. At the time, Sam had been sure it was because Al blamed him for abandoning him, but he realized now that Al had been telling the truth the whole time. He’d _let_ Sam do it because he thought Sam’s life, his sanity, was worth it. Whatever _it_ was.

“Damn, this thing’s getting ripe, J!” Pooch yelled into the sudden silence. “Jolene comes home with him smelling like this, and you’re dead, buddy!”

Sam’s gut twisted hard as Jake took a shallow breath and plastered on a fake smile. “I better get back in there,” he said as he jumped the eight feet to the ground and landed harder than he’d obviously meant to. He sounded manically amused and sick to the soul. “Don’t want to face Jolene’s wrath.”

“Jake!” Sam called after him.

“What?” Jake asked desperately as he stopped in the middle of the dying lawn without turning to face them.

“It’s not survivor’s guilt if you all lived,” he said simply.

“Yeah,” Jake muttered, just loud enough to be heard as he limped toward the house. “Happily ever after, right?”

Sam sighed, staring at Jake’s slumped shoulders for a long moment before contemplating the unstable ladder he’d used to get up the tree. “I’m not sure I can get down,” he groaned.

“Leaped before you looked again, eh, Sammy?” Al asked light-heartedly. Funny, the rift between them seemed to be shrinking by the second. A rift Sam had built himself, apparently.

He maneuvered his way down to the ground and dusted at his pant legs.

“Pretty good advice, Kid,” Al told him, more serious now, but warm and caring and _Al_ , like Sam had been missing.

“That you think I should take myself, right?” he shot back, feeling the almost normal energy between them.

Al shook his head. “Thinking _I_ should take it.”

“You? Why?” What had Al done in all of this?

“Every memory in my head, _you_ had to make, Sam,” he said quietly. “And I couldn’t do a damn thing but watch—”

“Al, you were the only thing that kept me _sane_!” Sam interrupted. “If you weren’t there—”

“That’s just it, Kid,” he grated back angrily. “I wasn’t. Not really. Not enough.” He shook his head and ran a hand over his hair in distress. “If we could just have figured out how to get you back…”

“Then Julius Sampson would be dead,” Sam said quietly. “And Beth wouldn’t—” He cut himself off. As Donna would say, crud.

Al smiled sadly and looked up at him. “I wondered,” he said. “Once you got back, I remembered what she said to me when I finally came home. She said a man came and told her I was coming home someday. Told her she should wait for me.” He chuckled wryly. “She kept saying, right when she met you, that you looked so familiar!” He twisted the wedding ring on his finger. “Forty years, Sam,” he whispered. “You gave me that, and I couldn’t even get you home.”

Sam let the words sink in, the feelings. It would never in a million years have occurred to him that Al felt guilty for any of this.

“We both lived, Al,” he said simply.

“Yeah, Sammy,” Al agreed, sloughing off the sadness with that indomitable spirit of his. “We did. And so will Jake.”

Sam nodded. Jake would live because none of them would let it be any other way. He thought about Al’s reaction to Jake’s suicide in the offshoot. “You knew he killed himself?”

Al stared at the grill by the porch door, his voice flat and sorrowful. “Ziggy told me about the disparity in the size of the offshoot and… I don’t know. It was little things he let slip. I figured he died before the end of it.” He took a deep breath and looked back at Sam. “Knowing what happened THERE the first time, how likely would you think it was that it was natural causes?”

“Seriously, Pooch! His poop needs to be registered as a lethal weapon!”

Jake’s voice, almost truthfully bright and cheerful, burst out of the back door with him, as he and Pooch headed to the grill and made preparations to fire it up.

“Don’t you have a gas mask or something for people to wear when they change him?”

Pooch laughed. “Man, I got no sense of smell left, after two months of those diapers.” He leaned in, annoyance in his smile. “And believe me when I tell you that she makes sure I change as many of the things as I can.”

Jake smiled. “Payback’s a bitch, man,” he agreed. He looked up and saw Sam and Al right where he’d left them ten minutes ago. The look in his eyes said he was working on forgetting and they’d damn well better keep their mouths shut. “Don’t worry guys,” he called to them. “I think the smell is mostly confined to the house.”

Clay walked out, a bottle of beer in his hand and a stormy look in his eyes. “I’ll attest to that. Jesus, Jensen, did you even use the spray?”

Jake looked at him in shock. “There’s a spray?”

***********

Jake actually managed to ignore his brain for most of the evening, which was a feat he was always proud of, the few times he accomplished it. He didn’t even let himself think about what Sam and Al had said until the two of them had gone back to their hotel rooms and Jenny had dragged Jolene out for a grown-up evening of a movie and coffee somewhere. Beth and Jerome were sleeping, the guys were somewhere around, and Jake was sitting by the firepit, trying not to see two sets of children burning before him.

Sam was wrong. It wasn’t survivor’s guilt, it was guilt guilt. It wasn’t like a bullet had hit Coug instead of him and he was left to carry on or some shit. He’d given his best damn friend a hug, put a nuke in his hands and then jumped into a pipe and motored his way to freedom. And it didn’t matter how many times he reminded himself that he’d saved Cougar the second time, didn’t even matter how many times he reminded himself that Cougar had never even tried to die on him HERE (well, not seriously, anyway), the fact remained that, when push came to shove, he’d turned tail and run and Cougar had died.

Sam could go to Hell with his platitudes and Jake would meet him there. Just not too soon.

“Are you ever going to burn this?”

Cougar’s question was accompanied by a black notebook with a shell in the corner, waving in front of his face.

“It’s a great story,” Jake offered dully. He just wasn’t up to trying to be normal right now. The usually comforting fact that Cougar never expected him to be didn’t actually make him feel better right now. “Thinking of finding a publisher.”

“No,” Cougar said, pulling it back out of his hands. “You think too much, Jake.”

“Not actually a bad thing in a tech, Coug.”

Cougar didn’t rise to the bait. He sat next to him and flipped through the pages and pages of chicken scratch, though it was too dark to read any of it. “Don’t try to be normal.”

Jake wanted to play the game. He wanted to think up a clever comeback. What came out instead was cold and raw and pathetic. “I’m tired of trying, Cougar. It’s just…”

“I don’t care what happened there,” Cougar said quietly. “It never happened and I was never there and whatever you think you did to betray me or fail me I don’t care. Here, you have my back. Always.”

Jake just stared at him for a long moment. “I have honestly never heard you say that many words at one time, Coug.”

“Shut up and stop trying to distract me.” Cougar leaned forward. “You can’t forget what you don’t stop thinking about, _hermano_.”

Jake tensed up despite himself. “You’ve been talking to the Time Travel Twins, haven’t you?” he asked, wondering why it made him so angry to think of them talking about him behind his back. He knew they did it—but not about _this_.

Cougar sniffed disdainfully. “I don’t need to talk to anyone,” he replied. “I know you, Jake. You won’t ask forgiveness—you don’t _need_ forgiveness—but I give it anyway.” He grinned in the darkness, firelight flashing off his teeth. “It was probably my fault, anyway, yes?”

“You don’t understand,” Jake started, his gut clenching in anticipation of his words. He’d never admitted to Cougar what he’d done THERE. He’d never even written it down in the damn notebooks, for fear of someone trying to _help_ and reading it by mistake or design or… “Cougar, I left—”

“Don’t.” Cougar looked at the dying flames. “I don’t care.” He probably saw the children there, too. Firepits were fucking overrated. “Do you trust me?”

Jake chuckled. “That’s a—”

“Do you trust me?” Cougar repeated relentlessly.

“I… Yeah. I do.” _Hell of a lot more than I do myself._

Cougar showed him the notebook for about two seconds and then threw it into the firepit. “Think less.”

Jake couldn’t stop the laughter that bubbled up at the completely ridiculous suggestion. It took over for a long moment, and he was left aching and spent and… better.

“Think less, huh?” Words to live by, he guessed. Words he _had_ lived by, until all this shit. Maybe, if he really let himself just _stop_. For real. Stop remembering, stop worrying… Forget this, too.

 _Well,_ he thought, feeling something loosen in his chest as he watched page after page blacken and curl, _not this._ This, he’d remember.

“You know I have, like, ten more of those, right?” He chuckled lightly as Cougar joined in.

“Shit, man, it’s freezing out here, what the hell are you two doing?” Pooch sat down on his other side and stared at the flames. “I’m not interrupting one of those ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ moments, am I?”

“Fuck you, Pooch,” Jake muttered lightly.

“I think those are the moments he’s talking about,” Clay put in, dropping to sit on the bench across the flames from them all.

“And fuck you, too,” Jake replied. “Sir.”

Clay shook his head. “I’m nobody’s ‘sir’ anymore, Jake.” He was silent for a long moment, staring at nothing. “You boys gonna help me crew that boat, if I buy it?” he asked suddenly. “Mom’s expecting me to sail her off to Borneo.”

“Borneo is in Asia, you know?” Pooch said with a laugh.

“Whatever. It’s where she wants to go.” Clay sighed. “When she remembers.”

 _Ah, to_ want _to remember,_ Jake thought, though not as bitterly as he might have. They dropped into the kind of silence they had before all this shit happened. A silence of friendship and futures, instead of betrayal and Hell.

“Fourteen months and eight days,” Pooch stated gravely.

“And a hell of a lot of lost lives,” Jake put in, trying to think of only those that happened HERE.

“But fewer than there could have been, boys,” Clay reminded them, the shadow of a colonel in his words. “Remember that.”

Jake grinned. Yeah, maybe he’d make a new watchcry. Remember that.

This here? Everyone alive and _living_? He could remember that.

********  
the end


End file.
